er father, a
more imperious demand to which he expects instant obedience.

As some consolation to his mistress, whose alternate tears, rage, and
reproaches drove him to distraction, he creates her Marquise de Verneuil
and promises that, if he should be unable to marry her, he will at least
give her a husband of Royal rank, the Due de Nevers, who was eager to
make her his wife.

But pleadings and threats alike fail to secure the return of the fatal
document, and Henri is reduced to despair, until Henriette gives birth
to a dead child and his promise thus becomes of as little value as the
paper it was written on. The condition has failed, and he is a free man
to marry his Tuscan Princess, while Henriette, thus foiled in her great
ambition, is in danger not only of losing her coveted crown, but her
place in the King's favour. The days of her wilful autocracy are ended;
and, though her heart is full of anger and disappointment, she writes to
him a pitiful letter imploring him still to love her and not to cast her
"from the Heaven to which he has raised her, down to the earth where he
found her." "Do not let your wedding festivities be the funeral of my
hopes," she writes. "Do not banish me from your Royal presence and your
heart. I speak in sighs to you, my King, my lover, my all--I, who have
been loved by the earth's greatest monarch, and am willing to be his
mistress and his servant."

To such humility was the proud, arrogant beauty now reduced. She was an
abject suppliant where she had reigned a Queen. Nor did her pleadings
fall on deaf ears. Her Royal lover's hand was given, against his will,
to his new Queen, but his heart, he vowed, was all Henriette's--so much
so that he soon installed her in sumptuous rooms in his palace adjoining
those of the Queen herself.

Was ever man placed in a more delicate position than this King of
France, between the rival claims of his wife and mistress, who were
occupying adjacent apartments, and who, moreover, were both about to
become mothers? It speaks well for Henri's tactfulness that for a time
at least this _menage a trois_ appears to have been quite amiably
conducted. When Queen Marie gave birth to a son it was to Henriette that
the infant's father first confided the good news, seasoning it with "a
million kisses" for herself. And when Henriette, in turn, became a
mother for the second time, the double Royal event was celebrated by
fetes and rejoicings in which each lady took