of St Germain
l'Auxerrois; and on returning to the Deanery, her aunt's home, became
seriously ill. She grew rapidly worse; her sufferings were terrible to
witness; and on Good Friday she was delivered of a dead child. To quote
an eye-witness, "She lingered until six o'clock in very great pain, the
like of which doctors and surgeons had never seen before. In her agony
she tore her face, and injured herself in other parts of her body."
Before dawn broke on the following day she drew her last breath.

When news of her illness reached the King, he flew to her swift as his
horse could carry him, only to meet couriers on his way who told him
that Madame was already dead; and to find, when at last he reached St
Germain l'Auxerrois, the door of the room in which she lay barred
against him. He could not take her living once more into his arms; he
was not allowed to see her dead.

Henri was as a man who is mad with grief; he was inconsolable.. None
dared even to approach him with words of pity and comfort. For eight
days he shut himself in a black-draped room, himself clothed in black;
and he wrote to his sister, "The root of my love is dead; there will be
no Spring for me any more." Three months later he was making love to
Gabrielle's successor, Henriette d'Entragues!

Thus perished in tragedy Gabrielle d'Estrees, the creature of sunshine,
who won the bravest heart in Europe, and carried her conquest to the
very foot of a throne.

CHAPTER V

A QUEEN OF HEARTS

If ever woman was born for love and for empire over the hearts of men it
was surely Jeanne Becu, who first opened her eyes one August day in the
year 1743, at dreary Vaucouleurs, in Joan of Arc's country, and who was
fated to dance her light-hearted way through the palace of a King to the
guillotine.

Scarcely ever has woman, born to such beauty and witchery, been cradled
less auspiciously. Her reputed father was a scullion, her mother a
sempstress. For grandfather she had Fabien Becu, who left his
frying-pans in a Paris kitchen to lead Jeanne Husson, a fellow-servant,
to the altar. Such was the ignoble strain that flowed in the veins of
the Vaucouleurs beauty, who five-and-twenty years later was playfully
pulling the nose of the fifteenth Louis, and queening it in his palaces
with a splendour which Marie Antoinette herself never surpassed.

From her sordid home Jeanne was transported at the age of six to a
convent, where she spent nine years in rebellion