The story of this place
In the Béarn foothills of the Pyrenees, the Château de Pau was the birthplace, on 13 December 1553, of the future King Henry IV, the most beloved of French monarchs. Legend, carefully cultivated, holds that his lips were rubbed with garlic and moistened with Jurançon wine at birth to make him hardy, and that his cradle was a single giant sea-turtle shell, still displayed in the castle. Raised partly as a rugged country boy, Henry of Navarre grew up to end the Wars of Religion, convert famously with the quip 'Paris is worth a Mass', and issue the Edict of Nantes. Later restored by Louis-Philippe and Napoleon III, the château is a museum to the king who wished every peasant 'a chicken in the pot' on Sundays.