When news of her illness reached the King, he flew to her swift as his horse could carry him, only to meet couriers on his way who told him that Madame was already dead; and to find, when at last he reached St Germain l'Auxerrois, the door of the room in which she lay barred against him. He could not take her living once more into his arms; he was not allowed to see her dead. Henri was as a man who is mad with grief; he was inconsolable.. None dared even to approach him with words of pity and comfort. For eight days he shut himself in a black-draped room, himself clothed in black; and he wrote to his sister, "The root of my love is dead; there will be no Spring for me any more." Three months later he was making love to Gabrielle's successor, Henriette d'Entragues! Thus perished in tragedy Gabrielle d'Estrées, the creature of sunshine, who won the bravest heart in Europe, and carried her conquest to the very foot of a throne. CHAPTER V A QUEEN OF HEARTS If ever woman was born for love and for empire over the hearts of men it was surely Jeanne Bécu, who first opened her eyes one August day in the year 1743, at dreary Vaucouleurs, in Joan of Arc's country, and who was fated to dance her light-hearted way through the palace of a King to the guillotine. Scarcely ever has woman, born to such beauty and witchery, been cradled less auspiciously. Her reputed father was a scullion, her mother a sempstress. For grandfather she had Fabien Bécu, who left his frying-pans in a Paris kitchen to lead Jeanne Husson, a fellow-servant, to the altar. Such was the ignoble strain that flowed in the veins of the Vaucouleurs beauty, who five-and-twenty years later was playfully pulling the nose of the fifteenth Louis, and queening it in his palaces with a splendour which Marie Antoinette herself never surpassed. From her sordid home Jeanne was transported at the age of six to a convent, where she spent nine years in rebellion against rules and punishments, until "the golden head emerged at last from black woollen veil and coarse unstarched bands, the exquisite form from shapeless, hideous robe, the perfect little feet from abominable yellow shoes," to play first the rôle of lady's maid to a wealthy widow, and, when she wearied (as she quickly did) of coiffing hair, to learn the arts of millinery. "Picture," says de Goncourt, "the glittering shop, where all day long charming idlers and handsome great gentlemen lounged and ogled; the pretty milliner tripping through the streets, her head covered by a big, black _calèche_, whence her golden curls escaped, her round, dainty waist defined by a muslin-frilled pinafore, her feet in little high-heeled, buckled shoes, and in her hand a tiny fan, which she uses as she goes--and then imagine the conversations, proposals, replies!"