The same sensible grandfather, having different views on the subject of education from those manifested by Catharine de Medici toward her children, had the boy taught to run about bareheaded and barefooted, like a peasant, among the mountains and rocks of Béarn, till he became as rugged as a young bear and as nimble as a kid. Black bread and beef and garlic were his simple fare; and he was taught by his mother and his grandfather to hate lies and liars, and to read the Bible. When he was fifteen, the third religious war broke out. Both his father and grandfather were dead. His mother, who had openly professed the Reformed faith since the death of her husband, who hated it, brought her boy to the camp at Rochelle, where he was received as the chief of the Huguenots. His culture was not extensive. He had learned to speak the truth, to ride, to shoot, to do with little sleep and less food. He could also construe a little Latin, and had read a few military treatises; but the mighty hours of an eventful life were now to take him by the hand and to teach him much good and much evil, as they bore him onward. He now saw military treatises expounded practically by professors like his uncle Condé, and Admiral Coligny, and Lewis Nassau in such lecture rooms as Laudun, and Jarnac, and Moncontour, and never was apter scholar. The peace of Arnay-le-Duc succeeded, and then the fatal Bartholomew marriage with the Messalina of Valois. The faith taught in the mountains of Béarn was no buckler against the demand of “The mass, or death!” thundered at his breast by the lunatic Charles, as he pointed to thousands of massacred Huguenots. Henry yielded to such conclusive arguments, and became a Catholic. Four years of court-imprisonment succeeded, and the young king of Navarre, though proof to the artifices of his gossip Guise, was not adamant to the temptations spread for him by Catharine de Medici. In the harem entertained for him in the Louvre, many pitfalls entrapped him, and he became a stock-performer in the state comedies and tragedies of that plotting age.