The trumpet sounded, and the king and his courtiers galloped back to the forest of Vincennes. The decrees were registered. Parliament had ventured to try its strength against Cardinal Mazarin, but did not dare to disobey its king. The marriage of the king was a matter of much importance, and was much talked of. The aspirants for his hand and the throne of France were numberless. Maria Theresa, the daughter of the king of Spain, was very beautiful. Spain and France were then engaged in petty and vexatious hostilities, and a matrimonial alliance would secure friendship. So negotiations were begun; and on the 10th of June, 1660, Louis, then in the twenty-second year of his age, was joined in marriage, at the Isle of Pheasants, to Maria Theresa, infanta of Spain. On the 26th of August, the king and his young bride made their public entry into Paris. Triumphal arches spanned the thoroughfares, garlands of flowers and hangings of tapestry covered the fronts of the houses, and sweet-scented herbs strewed the pavements, upon which passed an apparently interminable procession of carriages, horsemen, and footmen; and in the midst of the clangor of trumpets, the boom of cannon, and the shouts and acclamations of the multitude, came the chariot of the young queen, who, radiant and sparkling with brilliant gems, beheld from her lofty height all Paris striving to do her honor. By her side rode the king. His garments, of velvet richly embroidered with gold, and covered with jewels, had been prepared at an expense of over a million of dollars. The gorgeousness of this gala day lived long in the minds of the splendor-loving Parisians. For succeeding weeks and months, the court luxuriated in one continued round of gayety. “There was a sound of revelry by night” in the _salons_ of the Louvre and the Tuileries, while lords and ladies trod the floors in the mazy evolutions of the dance. And yet, to maintain all this state, all this splendor, all this reckless extravagance, thousands of the peasantry of France were compelled to live in mud hovels, to wear the coarsest garb, to eat the plainest food, while their wives and daughters toiled barefoot in the fields. The Cardinal Mazarin was old and dying. For eighteen years he had been virtually monarch of France. Avaricious and penurious to the last degree, he had amassed enormous wealth. Cursed by the peasantry whom he had ground to the earth, hated by the king whom he had tried to rule, despised by the court which he had attempted to humble, on the 9th of March, 1661, at his Chateau Mazarin, the cardinal breathed his last. From that moment until the day of his death, Louis XIV. sat all-powerful upon his throne. And when the president of the Ecclesiastical Assembly inquired of the king to whom he must hereafter address himself on questions of public business, the emphatic and laconic response was, “_To myself_.”