e other
gentlemen, ordered the leathern curtains at the sides to be rolled up;
at the corner of the Rue Saint-Honore and the narrow Rue de la
Ferronnerie there was a temporary blockade caused by two wagons, one
laden with wine and the other with hay,--Ravaillac took advantage of the
halt to mount with one foot on one of the spokes of the hind wheel on
the side where the king was sitting and stabbed him three times, though
the second stroke was instantly mortal.

The consternation was general and overwhelming, and with reason. "There
might be seen men, as if struck by lightning, suddenly fall unconscious
in the middle of the streets; several persons died very suddenly."

Henri III was the first King of France who made use of a carriage, but
horses and mules long remained the favorite means of transportation for
those who did not go afoot. Sober personages, magistrates and burghers,
rode mules, and the ladies were loath to give up their hackneys for the
new machines. Sauval, in his _Antiquites de Paris_, relates that he had
been informed by a certain ancient dame--Madame Pilon--that there were
no coaches in Paris until after the time of the League, some sixteen
years before the death of Henri IV, and that the first person to appear
in one was a relative of her own, the daughter of a wealthy apothecary
of the Rue Saint-Antoine. Glass windows for them were not used till the
reign of Louis XIV, who sent a coach so furnished as a gift to Charles
II of England. The usage of tobacco began to be general under Henri IV,
and soon became so excessive that the strongest measures were taken
against those addicted to this habit. The beard of this monarch was also
considered an offensive innovation by his Catholic subjects, and is even
said to be responsible for more than one of the fanatical attempts on
his life. His Huguenot subjects, however, "drew a hope from his
continuance to wear it that their renegade chief might yet be of the
number of the predestined."

"A hundred virtues of a valet, and not one virtue of a master," said
Tallemant des Reaux of Henri's son, Louis XIII, as he grew to manhood.
In two very recent publications on this historical period, M. Berthold
Zeller, drawing his details from the contemporary reports of the
Florentine and Venetian ambassadors at the court of France, presents a
striking picture of the feebleness and ineptitude of the young king,
even after the date of the official ending of his minority, Oct