of his great, though somewhat thrifty, ally, Elizabeth of England, that “if God shall, by His merciful grace, grant you victory, I swear to you that it will be more than your carelessness deserves.” Kipling, in an unforgettable phrase, has told us all about the “female of the species”; and in many ways, Elizabeth was the female of the species to which Henri Quatre belonged. The daughter of Henry VIII would have had no mercy if her own ends had been at stake. And yet, I don’t know. Tilly a few years afterwards showed at Magdeburg the horrors that could be perpetrated by religious enthusiasts; and one hates to think that Elizabeth’s famous patriotism could ever have allowed her to sacrifice London for a point of belief. Henri Quatre had not only allowed friends in Paris to be fed while he was supposed to be investing it savagely, but he had allowed it to slip through his fingers when he might have captured it, all through a tender-heartedness that would spare its citizens the horrors of a Magdeburgian sack. It is no wonder that with all his faults he is one of the heroes of France. Then Parma, finding that the Parisians hated Spanish pride more than they hated French Protestants, went away with his invincible army; and as soon as his back was turned Henri resumed the siege. Parma had proved, if nothing more, that he was a better strategist than Henri Quatre; but Paris returned to the old misery of starvation and disease, a misery that it has so often braved nobly. And now began Henri’s more serious troubles with women. For a long time he had an affair with one Madame de Grasmont, whom he called Corisande. To her he wrote the most passionate of letters. Anybody would think to read them that he really loved her; but even as he besieged Paris he had fallen in love with the abbesses of Poissy and Montmartre, whose profession should have taught them wisdom if not virtue. Now came a more serious affair. In 1590 he met a Gabrielle d’Estrees, with whom he fell violently in love while he was “carrying on” with the other three ladies. She already had a beautiful lover; but that did not matter to Henri Quatre. Probably it only caused him to admire her the more. He slipped through detachments of the enemy dressed as a woodcutter with a bundle of straw on his head to visit her: a nice romantic and undignified action for a king; but we shall see later, as he grew older, how he could stoop even lower. For the present the problem was how to gain possession of Gabrielle, get rid of Corisande, and set up a nominal possessor who should not be a rival in Gabrielle’s heart. He got her father to marry Gabrielle to a M. de Liancourt, an aged widower with eleven children, while Henri IV enjoyed the _droits de seigneur_. Corisande, growing old, dropped out of the picture.