Henri was broken-hearted; he swore that never more could he see happiness again. Yet three months later he was paying court to a very different sort of woman from Gabrielle—to Henriette d’Entragues, a slim girl of eighteen with a bitter tongue. He was then about fifty years of age, and had led a very anxious and troubled life. He had been a hard rider, a famous cavalryman. At the end of a few weeks of “courtship” he induced Henriette to accept a document in which he promised to marry her if she could bear him a living son in the course of a year. Henriette agreed to try, and joyfully took her position as the mistress and promised wife of the King. But alas for Henriette! Six months later there came a terrible thunderstorm that caused her to miscarry, and released Henri of his bargain. But his ministers had already engaged him to Marie de’ Medici; and Henri probably felt that Jove’s thunderbolt had come to his assistance. By that time Marguerite had been duly divorced by an obliging Pope, who would no doubt do a great deal for the brand plucked from the burning of Protestantism. In middle age Marguerite became enormously fat, and there are many stories told about her orgies with footmen and other tall fellows. It is said that, if they died in her service, she used to carry their hearts about her in a bag, and that she used to wear a wig made from their locks of yellow hair. Indeed, imagination has exhausted itself in devising infamies for the last years of Marguerite de Valois. It is difficult to recognise this corpulent and beraddled woman in the gay young princess who danced to lute and pizzicati strings in the “Huguenots.” Reine Margot indeed had a sorrowful ending, judging by the ordinary canons of human happiness. But perhaps the stories are not true. She is always considered an amazing example of the Valois faculty for combining artistic sensibility with the grossest lust. Strange things are said to have happened in history; and one must always remember her very unhappy marriage.