n of his second visit he wore a suit of purple satin, of
intent so lightly sewn with pearls that as he moved he shook them off
like raindrops, and left them to lie where they fell, as largesse for
pages and the lesser fry of the Court.

His equipages and retinue were of a kind to match his personal
effulgence. His coaches were lined with velvet and covered with cloth
of gold, and some seven hundred people made up his train. There were
musicians, watermen, grooms of the chamber, thirty chief yeomen, a
score of cooks, as many grooms, a dozen pages, two dozen footmen, six
outriders, and twenty gentlemen, each with his own attendants, all
arrayed as became the satellites of a star of such great magnitude.

Buckingham succeeded in his ambition. Paris, that hitherto had set the
fashion to the world, stared mouth-agape, dazzled by the splendour of
this superb and scintillating ambassador.

Another, by betraying consciousness of the figure that he cut, might
have made himself ridiculous. But Buckingham's insolent assurance was
proof against that peril. Supremely self-satisfied, he was conscious
only that what he did could not be better done, and he ruffled it with
an air of easy insouciance, as if in all this costly display there was
nothing that was not normal. He treated with princes, and even with
the gloomy Louis XIII., as with equals; and, becoming more and more
intoxicated with his very obvious success, he condescended to observe
approvingly the fresh beauty of the young Queen.

Anne of Austria, then in her twenty-fourth year, was said to be one
of the most beautiful women in Europe. She was of a good height and
carriage, slight, and very gracefully built, of a ravishing fairness of
skin and hair, whilst a look of wistfulness had come to invest with an
indefinable tenderness her splendid eyes. Her childless marriage to the
young King of France, which had endured now for ten years, had hardly
been successful. Gloomy, taciturn, easily moved to suspicion, and
difficult to convince of error, Louis XIII. held his wife aloof,
throwing up between himself and her a wall of coldness, almost of
dislike.

There is a story--and Tallemant des Raux gives credit to it--that in the
early days of her reign as Queen of France, Richelieu had fallen deeply
in love with her, and that she, with the mischief of an irresponsible
young girl, had encouraged him, merely to betray him to a ridicule which
his proud spirit had never been able to