Castles and Chateaux of Old Navarre and the Basque Provinces — Reading Notes

Henri de Navarre as a Romantic Anchor

The catalog subjects list “Castles — France” and “Pyrenees — Description and travel,” but the excerpts reveal that the book’s organizing figure is not a building but a person: Henri de Navarre. Miltoun calls him “the chief romantic and historical figure of all that part of France bounded on the south by the Pyrenean frontier of Spain.” The narrative traces his lineage through his mother, Jeanne d’Albret, and his upbringing at the ancestral château at Pau, where he supposedly acquired a training in chivalry second only to François I. This biographical thread provides a unifying device for a work that otherwise ranges across multiple provinces. The author does not claim to offer a complete biography; rather, Henri serves as a recurring reference point, linking disparate chateaux and regions through his life story. The excerpts include a dramatic scene where Catherine de’ Medici declares she will go to Nérac to conclude a treaty with “Reine Jeanne,” mother of Henri de Béarn, and that the marriage of Henri and Marguerite will follow. This suggests the book incorporates historical dialogue or tradition, though the author cautions that “tradition—or perhaps it is a fact” is often uncertain.

Observations on Béarnais Character and Dress

Miltoun devotes considerable space to the people of Béarn, offering a mix of received tradition and personal experience. He notes that tradition describes the Béarnais as “irascible and jealous,” but he finds no external evidence to support this, having found them “faithful, willing” helpers when his automobile got stuck in Pyrenean valleys. He contrasts the stereotype of knife-drawing vengeance with the fact that the préfet of the Basses-Pyrénées reports more legal business than ever, suggesting a law-abiding populace. The author also details peasant dress: a woollen head-dress “drawn down over the left ear in a most dégagé fashion,” a long blouse-like coat, and woollen breeches and gaiters in colors “anything you like and individual, but mostly brown or gray of those shades which were the progenitors of what we have come to know as khaki.” This attention to costume and character aligns with the travelogue genre but is not directly about castles; it reflects the book’s broader ethnographic interest, which the catalog subjects do not fully capture.

Language, Food, and Window-Pane Poetry

The excerpts include a striking detail about the Béarnais language: a patois composed of “Celtic, Latin and Spanish” elements, which Miltoun distinguishes from Breton or Basque as a “hybrid means of expression” rather than a true language. This linguistic observation is paired with a vignette about a Béarnais inn where the Prince de Conti saw a couplet chalked on the wall: “Je m’apuelle Robineau, / Et je bois mon vin sans eaux.” The prince added his own verse, and Miltoun comments that such “window-pane poetry” never soars but is “significant of the good living of past and present times in France.” These details—language, drinking habits, and improvised verse—illustrate the book’s tendency to wander from architectural description into social commentary. The catalog subject “Castles — France” gives no hint of these ethnographic and anecdotal digressions, which occupy a substantial portion of the excerpts. Readers expecting a focused architectural guide will find instead a discursive travel narrative that treats castles as one element among many in a regional portrait.

Miltoun’s work resists easy categorization: it is part architectural survey, part travel memoir, and part amateur ethnography. The catalog subjects emphasize castles and Pyrenean travel, but the excerpts show equal attention to regional character, costume, language, and historical anecdote. Readers will benefit from approaching the book as a period piece of early automobile tourism, where the author’s personal encounters and digressions are as central as the chateaux themselves. The illustrations by Blanche McManus, reproduced from paintings made on the spot, complement the text’s visual emphasis.

I sometimes think of the heather and grey stone of Navarre, and the quiet endurance of its old chateaux, when I recall that other book about a wilder, newer country. Both are records of human presence in vast, indifferent landscapes, though one whispers of centuries and the other of gold-rush mornings. The New Eldorado: A Summer Journey to Alaska — Themes and Context carries a similar loneliness between its lines.