The little Queen seems to have been singularly childish, for a princess brought up in the stately Court of Spain. Surrounded at first by her Spanish ladies, who adored and petted her, she made grave ambassadors anxious, though her coquettish beauty attracted the French. But there was a lack of majesty, a love of jokes and games, an impatience of everything serious, a quick and wilful temper, an amazingly short memory, combined with a frank regret for her old life--“bien souvent l’Espagne me manque,” she wrote home in the early days--hardly suitable to a Queen of France. Her new subjects did not complain; in truth, after the first rejoicings of her arrival, they saw little of her. Sometimes she appeared at Court balls, ballets and _carrousels_, brilliant in her fresh youth, with her dazzlingly white skin, large eyes, chestnut hair, and the exquisite hands which were her crowning beauty. Sometimes she drove out in a coach to Saint-Germain, and spent the day hunting and hawking with the King, who hardly cared for her company at any other time. Her chaplain, the Bishop of Luçon, attended on her at the Louvre as a most formal duty. Personally, Anne never liked him. Though not yet too terrible, he was always too serious for her. But the Spanish ambassador wrote of him to Philip III.: “There are not two men in France so zealous for the service of God, of our Crown, and of the public weal.” Time was to show whether his Excellency was right on all or any of these points. Louis XIII. had been an attractive little child, and was now a handsome, simple, straightforward boy, whose health and temper, unluckily, had been ruined by mismanagement. The diary of his physician, Hérouard--curious if unpleasant reading--shows us a child brought up on pills and potions quite as much as on food. Add constant and severe whippings for every small fault, and we have the training that Henry IV. and Marie de Médicis, here in entire agreement, thought fitting for their eldest son. Long after Louis was King of France the floggings continued, enraging interludes to Court etiquette and ceremonies. “Give me less manners and less whipping!” the poor boy cried one day, when his mother and her ladies rose and curtseyed on His Majesty’s entrance.