Louis was not vicious; it was his valetudinarian melancholy temperament which appears to have rendered him indifferent to ordinary human interests. He made less than no pretence of affection for his Spanish wife, for whose bright glances other men would have staked existence. For her, Buckingham forgot honour and duty to his own royal master, and did not spare compromising her repute. That is a page of history that remains sealed. How far it affected Louis’s feelings towards her through the rest of his life, remains an open question, or whether from the beginning, love and mutual inclination were at fault. “The wind bloweth where it listeth,” and the beauty and attractions of Anne of Austria may never have struck a responsive chord in the king’s heart. He was not destitute of sentiment. More than once he strove to fill the dreary void with the sympathy of other women of repute about the Court, and, in one instance at all events, not unsuccessfully; but he was not one to win love and friendship generally; and the consciousness of this chilled his manner still more, and threw him back upon himself. Gaston d’Orléans, with all his grave faults, had at least quicker outward intelligence and sufficient animation to win some extensive suffrages of the gentler sex, notably of Anne herself, who tolerated his attentions and coquetted with him up to a certain point; though how far this was policy, or from real sentiment, Court intrigues veil too entirely to attempt to determine, and the jealousy of Richelieu, himself enamoured of the queen, had soon put an end to all the aspirations of the two dukes. “There is no such word as fail,” Richelieu was often heard to say, and he did not fail to put his foot down very decisively when a league was formed, which the queen herself was said to favour, whose end and aim was to depose Louis the Just, crown Gaston, and give him Anne of Austria to wife.