hich, but
for her arrest, would have been executed three days earlier.

Buckingham, left alone, walked toward a mirror. His Musketeer's uniform
became him marvelously.

At thirty-five, which was then his age, he passed, with just title,
for the handsomest gentleman and the most elegant cavalier of France or
England.

The favorite of two kings, immensely rich, all-powerful in a kingdom
which he disordered at his fancy and calmed again at his caprice, George
Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, had lived one of those fabulous existences
which survive, in the course of centuries, to astonish posterity.

Sure of himself, convinced of his own power, certain that the laws which
rule other men could not reach him, he went straight to the object he
aimed at, even were this object were so elevated and so dazzling that it
would have been madness for any other even to have contemplated it. It
was thus he had succeeded in approaching several times the beautiful and
proud Anne of Austria, and in making himself loved by dazzling her.

George Villiers placed himself before the glass, as we have said,
restored the undulations to his beautiful hair, which the weight of his
hat had disordered, twisted his mustache, and, his heart swelling with
joy, happy and proud at being near the moment he had so long sighed for,
he smiled upon himself with pride and hope.

At this moment a door concealed in the tapestry opened, and a woman
appeared. Buckingham saw this apparition in the glass; he uttered a cry.
It was the queen!

Anne of Austria was then twenty-six or twenty-seven years of age; that
is to say, she was in the full splendor of her beauty.

Her carriage was that of a queen or a goddess; her eyes, which cast the
brilliancy of emeralds, were perfectly beautiful, and yet were at the
same time full of sweetness and majesty.

Her mouth was small and rosy; and although her underlip, like that
of all princes of the House of Austria, protruded slightly beyond
the other, it was eminently lovely in its smile, but as profoundly
disdainful in its contempt.

Her skin was admired for its velvety softness; her hands and arms
were of surpassing beauty, all the poets of the time singing them as
incomparable.

Lastly, her hair, which, from being light in her youth, had become
chestnut, and which she wore curled very plainly, and with much powder,
admirably set off her face, in which the most rigid critic could only
have desired a little less rouge,