Saint-Jean-de-Luz had a population of ten thousand two centuries ago; to-day it has three thousand, and most of those take in boarders, or in one way or another cater to the hordes of visitors who have made of it--or would if they could have suppressed its quiet Basque charm of colouring and character--a little Brighton. Not all is lost, but four hundred houses were razed in the mid-eighteenth century by a tempest, and the stable population began to creep away; only with recent years an influx of strangers has arrived for a week's or a month's stay to take their places--if idling butterflies of fashion or imaginary invalids can really take the place of a hard-working, industrious colony of fishermen, who thought no more of sailing away to the South Antarctic or the Banks of Newfoundland in an eighty-ton whaler than they did of seining sardines from a shallop in the Gulf of Gascony at their doors. Enormous and costly works have been done here at Saint-Jean-de-Luz since its hour of glory began with the marriage of Louis XIV with the Infanta of Spain, just after the celebrated Treaty of the Pyrenees. The ambitious Louis would have put up his equipage and all his royal train at Bayonne, but the folk of Saint-Jean would hear of nothing of the sort. The mere fact that Saint-Jean could furnish fodder for the horses, and Bayonne could not, was the inducement for the royal cortège to rest here. Because of this event, so says tradition, the king's equerries caused the great royal portal of the church to be walled up, that other royalties--and mere plebeians--might not desecrate it. History is not very ample on this point, but local legend supplies what the general chronicle ignores. On the banks of the Nivelle, in the days of Louis XIII, were celebrated shipyards which turned out ships of war of three hundred or more tons, to battle for their king against Spain. In 1627, too, Saint-Jean-de-Luz furnished fifty ships to Richelieu to break the blockade of the Ile of Ré, then being sustained by the English. One recalls here also the sad affair of the Connétable de Bourbon, his conspiracy against the king of France, and how when his treachery was discovered he fled from court, and, "accompanied by a band of gentlemen," galloped off toward the Spanish frontier. Here at Saint-Jean-de-Luz, almost at the very entrance of the easiest gateway into Spain through the Pyrenees, Bourbon was last seen straining every power and nerve to escape those who were on his trail, and every wit he possessed to secure an alliance with the Spanish on behalf of his tottering cause. "By Our Lady," said the king, "such treason is a blot upon knighthood. Bourbon a man as great as ourselves! Can he not be apprehended ere he crosses the frontier?" But no, Bourbon, for the time, was safe enough, though he met his death in Italy at the siege of Rome and his projected Spanish alliance never came off anyway.