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Sully is not to be duped by this circuitous mode of proceeding, and he lets the King see it.

"What am I to understand, Sire, by all these affirmatives and negatives? I can only conclude one thing, that you strongly desire to marry, and that you do not find a single woman on earth adapted to you. So completely does this seem to be the case, that it will be necessary to implore Heaven to restore the youth of the Queen of England, or to bring to life Margaret of Flanders, Mademoiselle de Bourgogne, Jeanne la Folle, Anne de Bretagne, and Marie Stuart, all rich heiresses, in order that you may make a choice;" and he, in his turn, began to joke and banter, and proposes, as a last resource, to have a proclamation made throughout the kingdom, that all the fathers, mothers, and guardians, who had beautiful daughters, who were tall and from seventeen to twentyfive years old, should bring them to Paris, that the King might choose from among them the wife who would be most agreeable to him; and he pursued this ludicrous view of the question with all kinds of embellishments.

The King, however, still insisted on three conditions, and determined to make himself sure of them beforehand, that the wife in question might be beautiful, that she might be gentle and amiable, and that she might bear him sons. Sully still maintained on his side, that he could not answer for any woman; that it would be previously necessary to make some trial with regard to these matters. Henry at length can contain himself no longer.

"And what would you say, were I to name one?"

Sully feigns astonishment, and is careful not to guess; he is not clever enough for that, he declares.

"Oh, you cunning fish," exclaims the King, "but I see well enough what you mean by playing the ignorant and simpleton; it is because you intend to make me name her, and I will do so." And accordingly he names his mistress Gabrielle, as evidently uniting those three conditions.

"Not that I thought of marrying her," said he, in an embarrassed tone, endeavouring to make a half retreat, "but I only wanted to know what you would say, if one day, on my being unable to find another, such a whim were to come into my head."

Some time after this curious conversation between Sully and the King at Rennes, the baptism of one of Gabrielle's sons took place, and they wished to treat him with the ceremony due to a royal child, the minister, who objected to a draft of this nature upon the treasury, exclaimed aloud, "There is no son of France!" and in consequence drew upon him the mother's direst anger.

The whole of this scene has been minutely related, as well as the reconciliation which Henry endeavoured to effect between his minister and his mistress, and which only served further to exasperate the latter. The language which, on this occasion, is put into the mouth of Gabrielle, appears to be quite natural, though not of the most refined description. These kind of scenes with her, however, were extremely rare. She was one of those women who soothe and cheer those whom they love, and who are the last to

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create a quarrel. Matters were in this position when the King was taken seriously ill, at Monceaux, when he received fresh proofs of her sincere attachment to him. At the beginning of the year 1599 Gabrielle was apparently nearly being raised to the dignity of queen; for she was again on the point of becoming a mother. From the moment her hopes of advancement began to increase, she grew particularly courteous and officious in attention to all, so much so, indeed, that those who were determined not to like her could not dislike her.

"It is really astonishing," confesses the satirical D'Aubigné himself, "how this woman, whose beauty had no tincture of earth in its character, has been able to live more like a queen than a mistress for so many years with so few enemies." It was one of Gabrielle's extraordinary charms, as well as really one of her arts, to possess the power of investing this equivocal and unblushing mode of life with a kind of dignity, nay, almost with an air of decency. She had, however, some enemies and a few rivals; the young Princess of Florence was already the subject of conversation. One day, in looking over the portraits of the marriageable princesses, she said to D'Aubigné, while pointing to the likeness of this princess, "She it is whom I fear." The King's heart had not been so entirely won over as it seemed to be; indeed, in spite of his well-known weakness on this head, he had always been known finally to surrender pleasure to business, for he had ever a principle of honour in his composition, which might, at the last moment, triumph over his love. This is undoubtedly what Sully means when he says to his wife, in quitting Paris to go to Rosny, in Holy Week, 1599, "The cord is well stretched, and the game would be exciting, provided the cord does not break;" but according to his notion, the success would not be so great as certain people imagined. The mind must be singularly constituted that could conjure this judicious observation of Sully's into a sign that he connived at the supposed poisoning of Gabrielle, and he might in truth say with Dreux du Radier, "This is a suspicion worthy of punishment."

The rest of Gabrielle's history is well known. She left the King at Fontainebleau to go to Paris, in order to perform her devotions during Holy Week; and proceeded to the house of an Italian financier, Zamet, who lived near the Bastille. On Holy Thursday, after dinner she went to hear the musical service of Tenebræ, at the Petit-Sainte-Antoine. She felt herself suddenly indisposed before the service was over, and returned to Zamet's; as her illness increased, she was anxious at once to leave the house, and to be taken to the residence of her aunt, Madame de Sourdis, near the Louvre. She was alternately seized with convulsions and with symptoms of apoplexy, which in a few hours quite altered her appearance. They announced her death, indeed, before she breathed her last: she expired during the Friday night, on the 9th or 10th of April, 1599.

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still acts of private vengeance rather than public cruelty. But the gradual, predetermined destruction of the young Dauphin, was the deliberate deed of a nation acting through its chosen repre

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