No wonder that the face he turned to the outside world--including, for him, his mother and his wife--was sulky and misanthropic. He had affection to give; but it was all for the one or two special friends who understood him, and who made it their business to help and indulge him in the sports he cared about; hunting and hawking three or four days a week in the forests and the open country near Paris; while in the intervals there were rabbits and small birds to be caught in the precincts of the Louvre and the Tuileries, and on wet days various indoor amusements--cooking, carpentering, turning, teaching his little dogs tricks, building card castles, and so on. He was passionately fond of music. Court functions bored him terribly; and though forced, after his majority, to attend the Council that ruled in his name, and behaving there with sufficient dignity and intelligence, he took very little active interest in affairs of State. This carelessness, though more apparent than real, exactly suited his mother, her favourites and her ministers. France was given to understand that the young King was too delicate, too incapable, to act for himself in any public way. It was not unnatural that all who had political or social ends to gain should have thought it safe to ignore the King and Queen as children of no account. But Louis XIII. had one trusted friend; and the Bishop of Luçon, with many others, was bitterly to repent a too low estimation of the powers of the Sieur de Luynes. Charles d’Albert de Luynes was now a man of eight-and-thirty. He was the eldest son of a small land-owner in Provence, and took his territorial name from a fief near Aix, which was his mother’s dowry. His two younger brothers, Honoré and Léon, who shared his marvellous fortunes--one becoming Duc de Chaulnes, the other Duc de Piney-Luxembourg--were known in their earlier days as Seigneurs de Cadenet and de Brantes; Cadenet being a small island in the Rhône, Brantes a farm and vineyard on a hill at Mornas. The three brothers, all clever and amiable, caring for each other with an unselfish affection rare in those days, began life as pages to François de Daillon, Comte du Lude, a very great man in his own province of Anjou, and a witty and audacious courtier. He and his friend M. de la Varenne advanced the three young southerners to the service of King Henry IV., who gave them appointments in the Dauphin’s household. Even then the three, generally liked and esteemed, says Richelieu, had but one pony and one good coat amongst them.