ere more frequent than usual, he speedily turned
Catholic with all his family; and having thus become irreproachable,
attained the lofty position of master tailor to the Crown of France.
Under Henry III., gay king as he was, this position was a grand as the
height of one of the loftiest peaks of the Cordilleras. Now Percerin had
been a clever man all his life, and by way of keeping up his reputation
beyond the grave, took very good care not to make a bad death of it, and
so contrived to die very skillfully; and that at the very moment he felt
his powers of invention declining. He left a son and a daughter, both
worthy of the name they were called upon to bear; the son, a cutter as
unerring and exact as the square rule; the daughter, apt at embroidery,
and at designing ornaments. The marriage of Henry IV. and Marie de
Medici, and the exquisite court-mourning for the afore-mentioned queen,
together with a few words let fall by M. de Bassompiere, king of the
_beaux_ of the period, made the fortune of the second generation of
Percerins. M. Concino Concini, and his wife Galligai, who subsequently
shone at the French court, sought to Italianize the fashion, and
introduced some Florentine tailors; but Percerin, touched to the
quick in his patriotism and his self-esteem, entirely defeated these
foreigners, and that so well that Concino was the first to give up his
compatriots, and held the French tailor in such esteem that he would
never employ any other, and thus wore a doublet of his on the very day
that Vitry blew out his brains with a pistol at the Pont du Louvre.

And so it was a doublet issuing from M. Percerin's workshop, which the
Parisians rejoiced in hacking into so many pieces with the living human
body it contained. Notwithstanding the favor Concino Concini had shown
Percerin, the king, Louis XIII., had the generosity to bear no malice to
his tailor, and to retain him in his service. At the time that Louis the
Just afforded this great example of equity, Percerin had brought up two
sons, one of whom made his _debut_ at the marriage of Anne of Austria,
invented that admirable Spanish costume, in which Richelieu danced a
saraband, made the costumes for the tragedy of "Mirame," and stitched
on to Buckingham's mantle those famous pearls which were destined to
be scattered about the pavements of the Louvre. A man becomes easily
notable who has made the dresses of a Duke of Buckingham, a M. de
Cinq-Mars, a Mademoiselle Nino