[47] Although he had resumed his relations with Madame de Verneuil, and seemed more infatuated with her than ever, his Majesty continued his attentions to Madame de Moret, and had also fallen in love with a certain Mlle. de la Haye, with whom he spent a honeymoon at Chantilly, obligingly placed at his disposal by the Connétable de Montmorency, under the pretext of enjoying the fine hunting which the neighbourhood afforded. This affair, however, only lasted a short time. The young lady, it appears, had persuaded his Majesty that he was the first who had gained her heart, but, in point of fact, she had begun her career of gallantry by a _liaison_ with M. de Beaumont, the late French Ambassador in England, who, however, had soon broken off his relations with her. Mlle. de la Haye had not forgiven him for this rupture, and, believing herself more in favour than she was, she endeavoured to prejudice the King’s mind against him. Beaumont, learning of this, promptly sent his Majesty the letters which Mlle. de la Haye had written him when she was his mistress; and Henri IV, indignant at having been deceived, broke with her in his turn. [48] Tallemant des Réaux, in his _Historiettes_, gives some details concerning this _liaison_ of Bassompierre and the part played therein by Henri, who appears to have been made a fool of, as in several analogous circumstances. “Bassompierre,” he writes, “had the honour to have for some time the King as rival. Testu, Chevalier of the Watch, assisted his Majesty in the affair. One day, when this man came to speak to Mlle. d’Entragues, she hid Bassompierre behind a tapestry, and said to Testu, who reproached her with being less cruel to Bassompierre than to the King, that she cared no more for the former than for the latter, at the same time striking with a switch which she held in her hand the place where her gallant was concealed.” [49] Men whose duty it was to remove the bodies of persons who had died of the plague or other contagious maladies. During several months of that year Paris was ravaged by an epidemic, which was either plague or a virulent form of typhus. [50] Nearly two centuries later, this adventure of Bassompierre so impressed the romantic imagination of Chateaubriand, then a young man of twenty, that he made a pilgrimage to the Rue Bourg-l’Abbé and “the third door on the side of the Rue Saint-Martin.” But, to the great disappointment of the future author of _René_, he found himself confronted, not by the old gabled house which Bassompierre must have entered and quitted so abruptly, but by a hopelessly modern residence, the ground-floor of which was occupied by a hairdresser’s shop, with “a variety of towers of hair behind the window-panes.” And “no frank, disinterested, passionate young woman” was to be seen, but only “an old crone, who might have been the aunt of the assignation.”