It
was the hope, the intense passion, with which his departed mother had
inspired him, that a grandson would arise from this union, who would,
with the spirit of Hannibal, avenge the family wrongs upon Spain.
Twice Henry took a grandson into his arms with the feeling that the
great desire of his life was about to be realized; and twice, with
almost a broken heart, he saw these hopes blighted as he committed the
little ones to the grave.

Summers and winters had now lingered wearily away, and Henry had
become an old man. Disappointment and care had worn down his frame.
World-weary and joyless, he still clung to hope. The tidings that
Jeanne was again to become a mother rekindled the lustre of his fading
eye. The aged king sent importunately for his daughter to return
without delay to the paternal castle, that the child might be born in
the kingdom of Navarre, whose wrongs it was to be his peculiar destiny
to avenge. It was mid-winter. The journey was long and the roads
rough. But the dutiful and energetic Jeanne promptly obeyed the wishes
of her father, and hastened to his court.

Henry could hardly restrain his impatience as he waited, week after
week, for the advent of the long-looked-for avenger. With the
characteristic superstition of the times, he constrained his daughter
to promise that, at the period of birth, during the most painful
moments of her trial, she would sing a mirthful and triumphant song,
that her child might possess a sanguine, joyous, and energetic spirit.

Henry entertained not a doubt that the child would prove a boy,
commissioned by Providence as the avenger of Navarre. The old king
received the child, at the moment of its birth, into his own arms,
totally regardless of a mother's rights, and exultingly enveloping it
in soft folds, bore it off, as his own property, to his private
apartment. He rubbed the lips of the plump little boy with garlic, and
then taking a golden goblet of generous wine, the rough and royal
nurse forced the beverage he loved so well down the untainted throat
of his new-born heir.

"A little good old wine," said the doting grandfather, "will make the
boy vigorous, and brave."

We may remark, in passing, that it was _wine_, rich and pure: not that
mixture of all abominations, whose only vintage is in cellars,
sunless, damp, and fetid, where guilty men fabricate poison for a
nation.

[Illustration: THE BIRTH OF HENRY IV.]

This little stranger received the ancestra