After a short stay at Bourgoin, the Court proceeded to Lyons, where it remained for several weeks, its sojourn being marked by splendid festivities. In the middle of October, a sad event came to interrupt these rejoicings: news arrived that, on the 13th, the Princesse de Condé had died in Paris, in giving birth to a daughter.[100] Brantôme assures us that Henri III. had fully resolved to petition the Pope to annul the marriage of Marie de Clèves and Condé--“which he would not have refused, since he was so great a king, and for divers other reasons that one wots of”--and to make the lady his queen; and it would seem that the princess was not indisposed to such an arrangement. However that may be, his Majesty exhibited the most extravagant grief at the death of his inamorata. On opening the letter which contained the fatal news, he instantly fell down in a dead faint, and was carried to his apartments, which he caused to be draped in black velvet, and where he remained shut up for several days, for the first two of which he persistently refused to touch either food or wine. When he, at length, reappeared, he was clad in the deepest mourning, and the points of his doublet and even the ribbons of his shoes were garnished with little death’s-heads. From that moment little death’s-heads in gold, coral, or crystal became the trinket _à la mode_. From being the life and soul of every fête and pleasure-party, the grief-stricken King now plunged into the most extravagant devotion, and at Avignon, to which the Court had removed, with the idea of affording him some distraction from his sorrow, nothing would content him but to join the Flagellants, a sect very strong in the Papal city, who, dressed in sackcloth, nightly paraded the streets by torchlight, chanting the _Miserere_ and scourging one another with whips. The Court and the Royal Family were compelled to follow suit; and the Cardinal de Lorraine, unaccustomed to such mortification of the flesh, caught a chill which caused his death. Theatrical as was Henri III.’s grief it was, nevertheless, of a more durable nature than such exhibitions usually are; and, some months later, the Cardinal de Bourbon was obliged to have the body of the Princesse de Condé removed from the vaults of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, in which it had been temporarily deposited, the King refusing to enter the abbey, as long as those precious remains were there. Even his marriage to the sweet and charming Louise de Lorraine,[101] which took place at Rheims, in February, 1575,[102] three days after his _Sacre_, seems to have been a tribute to the memory of his lost love, for the young lady, whom he had met at Nancy, on his way to Poland in the autumn of 1573, had first attracted his attention by the resemblance she bore to the Princesse de Condé.