Of course, the prosperity of Pau mainly depends upon its English residents, who are generally well-to-do people, spending their money freely. Shortly before my visit, however, a Russian prince, who had established himself in a neighbouring chateau, had quite thrown the English reputation for wealth into the shade. His equipages, his parties, the countess's diamonds, had overblazed the grandeur of the English all put together; and the way in which he spent money enraptured the good folks of the old capital of Bearne. The Russians, indeed, wherever they go on the continent, deprive us of our _prestige_ as the richest people in the world--an achievement for which they deserve the thanks of all Englishmen with heads longer than their purses. "_Ah, monsieur!_" I was once told, "_la pluie de guineés, c'est bonne; mais le pluie de roubles, c'est une averse--un deluge!_" Gaston Phoebus, Count de Foix, was a sad Bluebeard of a fellow, but he showed his taste in pitching upon a site for the castle of Pau. He reared its towers on the edge of a rocky hill. Far beneath sparkle the happy waters of the Gave--appearing and disappearing in the broken country--a tumbling maze of wooded hill, green meadow, straggling coppice, corn-fields, vineyards, and gardens--verily a land flowing with milk and honey. Further on, sluggish round-backed hills heave up their green masses, clustered all over with box-wood; and then come--cutting with many a pointed peak and jagged sierra--the bright blue sky--the glorious screen of the Pyrenees. From the end of the _Place_, which runs to the ridge of the bank on which stands the town, you may gaze at it for hours--the hills towering in peak and pinnacle, sharp, ridgy, saw-like--either deeply, beautifully blue, or clad in one unvarying garb of white; and beyond that, Spain. The same view from the castle is even still finer, as you are more elevated; and the sheer sink of the wall and rock below you, makes, as it were, a vast gulf, across which the mind leaps, even over the green stumbling landscape of the foreground to the blue or white peaks beyond. [Illustration: STATUE OF HENRI QUATRE.]