When he confidently asserted that, ‘in his own land of Béarn’, he answered to no overlord, Gaston III was only sixteen years old. If the self-portrait he was to pen long afterwards is to be believed, he was at that time barely emerging from a rather unpromising childhood. ‘I was born’, he wrote, ‘most depraved and frivolous, so much so that my father and mother were ashamed of me, and everyone said: “This one will be worthless, and woe is the land of which he will be lord!”’ Even allowing for the fact that this self-deprecation was part of a penitential exercise, the young Count of Foix seems to have cut a far less heroic figure than his near coeval, Edward Prince of Wales, who at the same age had already distinguished himself on the field of Crécy. One year later the son of Gaston ‘le Preux’ was engaging in dilatory chicanery unworthy of a nobleman: such at least might have been the contrasted view of many contemporaries, imbued with the ideals and the prejudices of chivalry, and perhaps unable to perceive the risk inherent in defying a power in momentary disarray, but still capable of a dangerous recovery.

Nothing is known of young Gaston's upbringing, but the ‘depraved and frivolous’ disposition he confessed did not prevent him from becoming more learned and literate than was usual among men of his caste. He wrote, with a good command of the principles of rhetorics, in three languages: French, Latin and the somewhat fossilized lémozi of the Troubadour tradition.