What complicated matters was his readiness to promise marriage. He would have had more wives than our Henry VIII. could he have made good all his engagements. Gabrielle would have been his queen in a few weeks had not the subtle poison of Zametti, the Italian usurer, cleared her from the path of the Florentine bride. Even in the short interval between her death and the landing of Marie de’ Medici at Marseilles, he had yielded to the wiles of Henriette de Balsac d’Entragues, half-sister to the Comte d’Auvergne, son of Charles IX., and had given her a formal promise of marriage. Henriette cared only for the sovereign, not for the man, who was old enough to be her father. In the glory of youth and insolence of beauty, stealthy, clever, and remorseless, a finished coquette and a reckless _intrigante_, she allured him into signing a formal contract of marriage, affianced though he was to a powerful princess proposed by the reigning Pontiff, whose good-will it was important to the King, always a cold Catholic, to secure. The new favourite claimed to be of royal blood through her mother, Marie Touchet, and, therefore, a fitting consort for the King. She showed her “marriage lines” to every one--did not hesitate to assert that she, not Marie de’ Medici, was the lawful wife; that the King would shortly acknowledge her as such, and send the Queen back whence she came, together with the hated Concini, her chamber-women and secretary, along with all the jesters and mountebanks who had come with her from Italy. Endless complications ensued with the new Queen. Quarrels, recriminations, and reproaches ran so high that Marie on one occasion struck the King in the face. Henry was disgusted with her ill-temper, but was too generous either to coerce or to control her. Her Italian confidants, Concini and his wife, however, made capital of these dissensions to incense Marie violently against her husband, and at the same time to gain influence over herself. Henry was watched,--no very difficult undertaking, as he had assigned a magnificent suite of rooms in the Louvre to his new mistress, between whose apartments and those of the wife there was but a single corridor. Henrietta meanwhile lived with all the pomp of a sovereign; there were feasts at Zametti’s, balls, and jousts, and hunting-parties at Saint-Germain and Fontainebleau. Foreign ambassadors and ministers scoured the country after the King; so engaged was he in pleasure and junketing. CHAPTER XXVII. A COURT MARRIAGE.