Free Deep France by Celia Brayfield

love with other people at that time, and frequently
afterwards.
    Somehow – Alexandre Dumas attributes it to the cleverness of his wife – Henri survived the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre. According to legend, when it was put to him later that
Paris would never accept a Protestant as King, he said, ‘Paris is worth a mass,’ and converted to Catholicism. After his marriage he spent much of his time in Paris in prison or under
house arrest. He finally escaped the toxic atmosphere of the court in 1576, re-converted to Protestantism and became the very able commander of the Huguenot resistance. The King, Catherine’s
neurotic oldest son, died a hideous death, bleeding from every pore, either from poisoning or TB. His younger brothers did not last much longer, and Henri of Navarre became Henri IV of France in
1589. He was a popular ruler, not least for his famous promise that when he was king every peasant would have a chicken in the pot every Sunday.
    Henri never went back to the Béarn, which he entrusted to the rule of his sister, Catherine. He did, however, pass the Edict of Nantes, which allowed both Catholic and Protestant
religions to exist side-by-side in France for almost ninety years. Ironically, he was assassinated by a Catholic in 1610. To this day, most towns in the Béarn have both a Catholic church and
a Protestant temple, and Henri remains a well-loved figure.
    Ten years after Henri became king, he and Marguerite had gone their separate ways and he married the Tuscan princess, Marie di Médici. Marguerite was a beautiful and clever woman, who
wrote poetry and a useful and amazingly frank volume of memoirs. Their marriage she regarded as theblight of her life, but it was an effective political alliance, and it seems
a pity that it was never more, since they had a lot in common, not least a good appetite for
la vie galante
. One of the many legends about ‘la reine Margot’ is that she kept
the hearts of her dead lovers in gold boxes, so it was perhaps as well for Henri that he was not among them.
    Our First Guests
    The beds were made, the croissants bought, the plans for New Year’s Eve laid. I drove to Dax to pick up our first visitors, Glynn and Carrie Boyd Harte, both painters,
and Henrietta Green, food writer and founder of the farmers’ market movement. They arrived together on the TGV, exclaiming over the interminable boredom of the Landes. Half an hour later, and
the serendipity of an outing in good company kicked in as soon as we stopped in Saliès-de-Béarn for the cashpoint at France’s most picturesque branch of the Credit Agricole.
    Since everyone fell in love with Saliès immediately, and started to feel frisky after the journey, it seemed like a good opportunity to show Glynn the interior of the Hôtel du Parc.
For reasons which nobody appreciates, this lovely building is in the hands of casino operators, who have filled its airy salons with fruit machines. Sedate as life in Saliès is, only a
handful of old ladies are so desperate for a good time that they find the fruit machines irresistible. The place can be a ghost Las Vegas, the
croupières
in the gambling rooms sit
chatting and inspecting their manicures all night and the machines twinkle into empty space.
    The hotel was built in the glory days of Salies. A builder from Oloron Sainte-Marie, J.-B. Cazenave, commissioned by a local developer, completed most of the work in a year. Ingood Béarnais tradition, the developer then ran out of money and a hotelier from Arcachon, on the Atlantic coast just south of Bordeaux, took over the enterprise. The hotel was
finished and opened for business in round about 1893, under the direction of the owner’s son, Gabriel Graner, whose initials, GG, are carved into the facades. It’s an imposing building,
overlooking the thermal baths, and surrounded by a melancholically unkempt park.
    After the Belle Époque, the White Russian princesses and the ‘sirs’ from England migrated to