Two days after this mournful little ceremony the body was carried through the Porte S. Denys, along the road which Henrietta had traversed as a bride, to the royal abbey, where it was to rest. There, watched by faithful guardians, it lay in a chapel behind the choir for more than a month, until the 20th of November, when the funeral service was celebrated. The obsequies were a magnificent affair, comparable with the splendours of the long-ago wedding. In the great church hung with black, on a magnificent mausoleum supported by eight marble pillars and blazing with a quantity of lighted tapers, Henrietta, who, living, had known what it was to lack the necessaries of life, lay as a King's daughter in her death, and that the contrast might be the more complete, her body, which had long laid aside the trappings of royalty, was covered by a gorgeous pall "of gold brocade covered by silver brocade and edged with ermine." By the will of the King representatives of the sovereign bodies were present, while the mourners included princes and princesses and even one of higher rank, for Casimir, the ex-King of Poland, who had exchanged his crown for a monk's frock, had journeyed to do honour to the Queen of England from the great Abbey of S. Germain des Prés, where he was spending a peaceful old age, and where his tomb may be seen to this day. The attendance of clergy indeed was not large, but that was only because orders had been issued that the sovereign bodies should be saluted before the prelates, an insult which the pride of the Church could not stomach. After a new and delightful rendering by the choir of the _Dies Iræ_, the Bishop of Amiens ascended the pulpit. Francis Faure was probably selected for this office partly because he had been a servant of the dead Queen in her early married life, and partly because she had taken pleasure in hearing him deliver the panegyric of S. Francis de Sales in the chapel of the convent of Chaillot on the occasion of the saint's canonization. It seems, however, that this "_cordelier mitré_", as Gui Patin calls him, was not very popular with Parisian audiences, for the discourse which he delivered at the funeral of Queen Anne was severely criticized, and his sermon on the Queen of England had no better reception. Nevertheless, it reads as the work of an honest and affectionate man earnestly striving, not always indeed with success, to avoid that flattery of the great of which the times were so tolerant, but which is peculiarly vain in connection with death, the great leveller. His text was, "Watch and pray"; and he dwelt with some sternness upon the awful suddenness of the Queen's end, of which the Chaillot nuns said sweetly that it was the mercy of God to save her from the apprehension of the death which she feared so much. The discourse[433] was long, and it was nearly four o'clock in the afternoon before the body of Henrietta Maria was lowered into the royal vault, to lie beside that of her father.