The trial, death, and burial of Charles I. had taken place before Queen Henrietta, besieged as Paris was from without, and her place of abode, the Louvre, beset from within, could receive the least intelligence concerning him. Meantime, her second son James, the young Duke of York, who had escaped from the custody of the republican English, was brought to her through the beleaguering lines of Paris. His arrival raised her spirits very high, too soon to be crushed. Whispers of the dire events in England had transpired through her circle at the Louvre; her English household gazed aghast on the unconscious widow, marveling how the tidings were to be told her. Such awe-struck looks caused her inquiries, but the answers she received almost stopped the springs of her life; when at last the queen comprehended her loss with all its frightful facts, she stood motionless as a statue, without words and without tears. "To all we could say our queen was deaf--frozen in her grief," writes Père Gamache, "at last, awed by her appalling grief, we became silent, with tearful looks bent on her. So passed the time till night-fall. When her aunt, the Duchess de Vendôme, whom she loved much and we had sent to in fear for the queen's life, came, she gently took the hand of the royal widow, kissed it, remained silent, and wept. Then Henrietta felt the relief of tears. She was able to sigh and weep when her little daughter, then four years old, was brought to her; and though she felt it hard to part with her, yet she longed to retire to some quiet place where she might, as she said, 'weep at will.'" The convent of the Carmelites, St. Jacques, was the place to which she retreated, with one or two of her ladies. The queen-regent of France sent Madame de Motteville to her afflicted sister of England. The sympathy felt for the afflicted daughter of their great Henry, induced the Frondoneers to let this lady pass their lines. "I was," she says, "admitted to her bedside. The queen, Henrietta, gave me her hand while sobs choked her speech. 'I have lost a crown,' she cried, 'but that I have long ceased to regret; it is the husband for whom I grieve; good, just, wise, virtuous as he was, most worthy of my love and that of his subjects; the future time must be for me but one succession of torture.'" Henrietta then sent important messages of advice to her sister-queen on her affairs, implored her to seek and hear the truth before it was too late, which, if her Charles or herself had ever been told, affairs needed not have taken the fatal turn that she should ever mourn. Queen Henrietta then asked that her newly-arrived son, the Duke of York, might be given the same allowance as his brother, now called by all her exiled court Charles II.