When he was about nineteen he married Marguerite de Valois, the third of that name, who has achieved fame under the popular name of Reine Margot. She was sister to King Henri III of France; our Henri was at that time only king of Navarre; his little kingdom lay in the south of France, near the borders of Spain. His father had been Anthony of Bourbon; his mother Joan of Albret. Joan had agreed to the marriage with a very heavy heart: she feared the bright eyes of the Catholic enchantress who was to bewitch her own beloved son. She herself was a Huguenot, who looked upon Marguerite as sent directly from the devil. If Marguerite had really been sent by Satan to the inferno of Parisian wickedness she needed no great ensnaring; for, when she married the good Henri of Navarre, simple young country bumpkin that he was, she is said to have already had an affair with the Duke of Guise, and her reputation for virtue would not have passed any great test. She was pretty, and what was more potent, she had a peculiar charm of manner that enabled her to capture all but the most resistant of men. Many of us remember how Marguerite, in the “Huguenots” of Meyerbeer, dances along the stage singing to her lute and plangent orchestral pizzicati “The fair land of Touraine.” Although this, according to Wagner, is very inartistic, still, it is very charming, and has no doubt left Marguerite for us moderns with a character that is more beautiful than it really was. She could no more resist enchanting a man than Henri could resist trying to possess a good-looking girl: the bonds of matrimony sat very lightly upon both. There was no love in the marriage, which was, almost more cynically than most royal marriages, simply an affair of State. Catherine de Medici, Marguerite’s mother, wished to convert Henri to the Catholic faith, and at the same time to make him an enemy of Spain, which, under Don John of Austria, had just won the earth-shaking victory of Lepanto.