The Comtes de Comminges were an able and vigorous race, if we are to believe the records they left behind. There was one, Loup-Aznar, who lived in 932, who rode horse-back at the age of a hundred and five, and one of his descendants was married seven times. It was a Comte de Comminges, in the time of Louis XIV, who was compared by that monarch to a great cannon ball, whose chief efficiency was its size. Subsequently cannon balls, in France, came to be called "Comminges." Not a very great fame this, but still fame, and it was still for their warlike spirit that the Commingeois were commended. Jean Bertrand, a one-time Archbishop of Comminges, became a Cardinal of France upon the recommendation of Henri II. The king afterwards confessed that he was persuaded to urge his appointment by Diane de Poitiers, who was distributing her favours rather freely just at that time. The "Mémoires du Comte de Comminges" was the title borne by one of the most celebrated works of fiction of the eighteenth century--a predecessor of the Dumas style of romance. It is a work which has often been confounded by amateur students of French history with the "Mémoires de Philippe de Commines," who lived in another era altogether. The former was fiction, pure and simple, with its scene laid in the little Pyrenean community, while the latter was fact woven around the life of one who lived centuries later, in Flanders. CHAPTER XV BÉARN AND THE BÉARNAIS The Béarnais and the Basques have no historical monuments in their country anterior to the Roman invasion, and for that matter Roman monuments themselves are nearly non-existent. Medals and coins have been occasionally found which tell a story neglected by the chroniclers, or fill a gap which would be otherwise unbridged, but in the main there is little remaining of a period so far remote, save infrequent fragmentary examples of Arab or Saracen art. Of later times as well, the splendid building eras of Gothic and Renaissance architecture, there is but little that is monumental, or indeed remarkable for richness. Architectural styles were strong and hardy, but most often they were a mélange of foreign forms, combined and presented anew by local builders. This makes for picturesqueness at any rate, so, taken as a whole, what the extreme southwest of France lacks in architectural magnificence it makes up for in quaintness and variety, and above all environment.