The plan of this match was nothing new. Henry IV. and Marie de Médicis had betrothed the heiress to their son Nicolas, Duc d’Orléans, when both were infants. After the boy’s early death it was proposed that he should be replaced by his younger brother, Gaston, but there was no formal contract. The Queen had never renounced the idea, specially welcome to her because of her friendship with the girl’s mother, the Duchesse de Montpensier, afterwards Duchesse de Guise, and of the warm affection she had always felt for Mademoiselle de Montpensier herself, who was now twenty-one, three years older than Gaston, and of a singularly sweet character. As to Monsieur, he has been described often enough. Handsome, intelligent, weak, foolish, restless, impressionable, gay and agreeable, false and cowardly, he inherited little of Henry IV. but his vices and frivolities. He had been ill-trained by his governor, Colonel--now Maréchal--d’Ornano, the Corsican officer who had won his post by devotion to Luynes at the time of Concini’s death. Since those days d’Ornano had owed some gratitude to Cardinal de Richelieu, and he was now superintendent of his former pupil’s household. The Cardinal had lately displeased him by refusing to admit him, with Monsieur, to the royal Council; and disappointed personal ambition was the chief cause of his throwing in his lot with those who were bent on making Monsieur the head of an opposing party in the State. On the whole, d’Ornano was probably more foolish than dangerous. Great ladies did what they pleased with him; and he seems to have confided his dreams of power, both for his young master and for himself, to no less a person than Père Joseph, the actual ear of Richelieu. But the centre of the cyclone was not in Monsieur’s own household: it was in the heart of the young childless Queen. Long afterwards Anne of Austria told Madame de Motteville that she had done all she could to prevent Monsieur’s marriage with Mademoiselle de Montpensier, believing that marriage to be entirely against her own interests. Already she was neglected enough, unhappy enough. Louis XIII., if not the worst of husbands, was sulky, suspicious, resentful. The Queen and her intimate friends lived in an atmosphere of gloom, almost of persecution, under the shadow of the King and his Minister. Louis hated Madame de Chevreuse, and with some reason if it is true that her wild spirits had led Anne into romping games which more than once cost France a Dauphin.