This circumstance reminds me of a still more remarkable effect, ascribed to a similar cause, experienced by Henry III of France. The marriage of the king of Navarre, afterwards Henry IV, with Marguerite de Valois, and that of the Prince de Condé with Marie de Cleves, was celebrated at the Louvre on the 10th of August, 1572. Marie de Cleves, then a most lovely creature only sixteen, after dancing much, finding herself incommoded by the heat of the ball-room, retired to a private apartment, where one of the waiting-women of the queen-dowager, seeing her in a profuse perspiration, persuaded her to make an entire change of dress. She had scarcely left the room when the Duke of Anjou, afterwards Henry III, who had also danced a great deal, entered it to adjust his hair, and, being overheated, wiped his face with the first thing that he found, which happened to be the shift she had just taken off. Returning to the ball, he fixed his eyes on her, and contemplated her with as much surprise as if he had never before beheld her. His emotion, his transports, and the attention which he began to pay her, were the more extraordinary, as during the preceding week, which she had passed at court, he appeared indifferent to those very charms which now made on his heart an impression so warm and so lasting. In short, he became insensible to every thing that did not relate to his passion. His election to the crown of Poland, say historians, far from flattering him, appeared to him an exile, and when he was in that kingdom, absence, far from diminishing his love, seemed to increase it. Whenever he addressed the princess, he pricked his finger, and never wrote to her but with his blood. No sooner was he informed of the death of Charles IX, than he dispatched a courier to assure her that she should soon be queen of France; and, on his return, his thoughts were solely bent on dissolving her marriage with the Prince de Condé, which, on account of the latter being a protestant, he expected to accomplish. But this determination proved fatal to the princess; for, shortly after, she was attacked by a violent illness, attributed to poison, which carried her off in the flower of her age. No words can paint Henry's despair at this event: he passed several days in tears and groans; and when he was at length obliged to shew himself in public, he appeared in deep mourning, and entirely covered with emblems of death, even to his very shoe-strings. The Princess de Condé had been dead upwards of four months, and buried in the abbey-church of _St. Germain-des-Prés_, when Henry, on entering the abbey, whither he was invited to a grand entertainment given there by Cardinal de Bourbon, felt such violent tremblings at his heart, that not being able to endure their continuance, he was going away; but they ceased all at once, on the body of the princess being removed from its tomb, and conveyed elsewhere for that evening.