At the Louvre, next to the Queen-Mother, the most profitable objects of a courtier’s devotion were the Maréchal and the Maréchale d’Ancre. They were Marie’s most intimate and inseparable friends. Unworthy of such a position, no doubt: but the wife of Henry IV. was hardly happy enough willingly to dispense with those who had followed her from Florence. Leonora Galigaï, her nurse’s daughter, first the companion of her childhood, had been appointed head of her maids: of low birth, but extremely clever, and only too capable of managing her mistress; though her own supposed account of her influence, “that of a clever woman over a dull fool,” seems to have been one of the many inventions of her enemies. A small, dark, ugly, keen-faced creature, Leonora had fallen in love with the handsome adventurer Concini, who had followed the Queen to France in search of fortune. They were married, and together they climbed the heights they desired. Concini swaggered among nobles and princes, the very type of a royal favourite. He was an insolent, magnificent bully, with whom the greatest in the land had to reckon. Yet, though envied and slandered, he was not entirely unpopular, even at Court. Bassompierre observed that he was neither perfection nor a fool. He had the daring courage which came of belief in his own lucky star. He was good-natured and kind, except to his wife; with her, in spite of their mutual interests, he quarrelled incessantly, and they lived mostly apart. But the many scandalous jokes, songs and stories which dealt with the supposed love-affairs of Concini and the Queen are pronounced by modern historians to be without foundation. For some years the husband and wife concerned themselves little with politics. Money and position, especially money, of which Leonora was excessively greedy, were their favourite objects. They bought a palace in the Rue de Tournon, near the old Hôtel de Luxembourg, and furnished it splendidly. But Concini lived chiefly in a house near the river, at the south-east corner of the small garden of the Louvre, between it and the old Hôtel de Bourbon. By a bridge from the house to the garden he could communicate with his wife’s apartments, above those of the Queen.