The Court was now brilliantly gay. The gloomy and sombre atmosphere of Louis XIII. and of Richelieu’s day faded all in a succession of balls and fêtes and every sort of festivity. Anne of Austria enlarged the south side of the Louvre, and Grimaldi and Romanelli adorned the chambers and galleries with their exquisite skill. Poussin, whose friezes terminated the ends of the great gallery, had had apartments assigned him in the Louvre, in order to carry on his work with greater facility; but he had retired in displeasure at the criticisms of his brother-artists, and went to Rome, where he spent the rest of his life, leaving in Paris immortal memories of his genius, among them the altarpiece for the chapel of St Germain en Laye, and the mournful Arcadian Shepherd, “_Et in Arcadia Ego_.” So the never-ending round of gaiety was set in motion by Mazarin, and Anne of Austria was the regent. Anne, still handsome, and by nature frivolous under her somewhat cold Spanish demeanour—surely a born coquette, delighting in show and magnificence, none the less that she had so long lived under repression. The queen, apparently, was the reigning power; but it was the crafty prime-minister who pulled the strings, and set the puppets dancing and fiddling, and amorously intriguing, so that they should leave him to carry on his politics, and mount to the heights of his ambition and power in his own unhindered way. Unlike his great predecessor, he was handsome, and good-natured in manner, and therefore an ornament in those brilliant assemblies. Wrote St Evrémond— “J’ai vu le temps de la bonne régence, Temps où régnait une heureuse abondance, Temps où la ville aussi bien que la cour Ne respirait que les jeux et l’amour. Une politique indulgente De notre nature innocente Favorisait tous les désirs Tout dégoût semblait légitime; La douce erreur ne s’appélait point crime, Les vices délicats se nommait des plaisirs.”