It is hard in such a matter to apportion blame. Charles cannot be acquitted of harshness and of a certain degree of subservience to Buckingham, while the act of expulsion was a flagrant breach of the faith plighted only a year before to a brother-sovereign. But it must be remembered that most of the information comes from French, and consequently hostile, sources. After all, the King of England's real fault was that, by his marriage contract, he had allowed himself to be placed in an impossible position, from which only violence could extricate him. On their own showing it is difficult to see how any self-respecting husband, let alone a great king, could have endured the Bishop of Mende, Madame S. Georges, or even Father Bérulle. They, for their part, had much to complain of, and they saw in every approximation of their mistress to English customs and ways of thought a menace, not only to the interests of France, but to the immortal soul placed in their charge. As for Henrietta herself, she can hardly be blamed. She was but a child, and it is not surprising that she followed the counsel of those whom her mother had set over her. The severest thing that can justly be said of her is that, at the age of sixteen, she had not completely learned the lesson of a wife, and, above all, of a royal wife, "to forget her own people and her father's house." [Footnote 29: The _Mémoires inédits du Comte Leveneur de Tillières_, published in 1862, are one of the principal authorities for Henrietta Maria's early married life: they are very full and vivid, but are coloured by the writer's dislike to the English, and especially to Buckingham.] [Footnote 30: Cf. the following description of Paris in a humorous poem of the day: "We came to Paris, on the Seyn, 'Tis wondrous faire but nothing clean, 'Tis Europes greatest Town. How strong it is, I need not tell it, For any man may easily smell it, That walkes it up and down." _Musarum Deliciæ_, by Sir J. M. and Ja. S. (1655), p. 19.] [Footnote 31: _Musarum Deliciæ_, by Sir J. M. and Ja. S. (1655), p. 49.] [Footnote 32: She had been in Turin with Henrietta's sister, Christine.] [Footnote 33: The French Oratory was quite distinct from the better known Roman Oratory founded by S. Philip Neri.] [Footnote 34: See the list of miracles attributed to his intercession in _La Vie du Cardinal Bérulle_. Par Germain Habert, Abbé de Cerisy (1646). Liv. III, chaps. XIV., XV.] [Footnote 35: P.R.O. Roman Transcripts.] [Footnote 36: The English Catholics were anxious lest she should allow herself to be crowned by a heretic: Fr. Leander de S. Martino, an English Benedictine, wrote a long letter to Bérulle on the subject in June, 1625, expressing his anxiety. Archives Nationales, M. 232.]