We must here explain that this interesting little affair had not been developing at all in accordance with his Majesty’s anticipations. Condé had accepted with becoming gratitude the handsome pension which the King had bestowed upon him and appeared far more interested in his wife’s dowry than in her person; while the fair Charlotte, on her side, scarcely troubled to conceal her indifference to a husband who was shy, awkward, and close-fisted, and lacking in all those qualities calculated to appeal to the imagination of a young girl. Indeed, there can be no doubt that she preferred the company of the King, despite his grey hairs and his wrinkled visage, and she appears to have given the amorous monarch no little encouragement, though perhaps innocently enough. But Condé, with all his faults, was an honourable man, and when he clearly understood the odious part which his royal “uncle” intended should be his; when he saw the King, usually so painfully neglectful of his person, powdered and scented and bedecked like the youngest gallant of his Court; when he learned that he was bombarding his wife with passionate sonnets, obligingly composed for him by Malherbe and other facile rhymesters; when he heard that the princess had stepped one night on to the balcony of her apartments and there unbound her hair and allowed it to fall about her shoulders to gratify a whim of her elderly admirer, who stood beneath “transported with admiration”; when, in short, he found that the King’s infatuation was the talk of Court and town, he began, as his Majesty expressed it, “to play the devil.” And, after several angry scenes, in which Henri IV entirely lost his temper, and all sense of dignity and decorum along with it, and Condé appears to have forgotten the respect which he owed to his sovereign in his resentment against the man who wished to dishonour him, the prince carried off his wife to the Château of Muret, in Picardy, not far from the Flemish frontier. The lovelorn King followed his inamorata, and, dressed as one of his own huntsmen, and with a patch over his eye, stood by the roadside to see her pass; and, in the same disguise, penetrated into a house where she was dining, and when she appeared at a window, kissed one hand to her, while he pressed the other to his heart.