n with a train of coaches, impatient to get
the first news from de Coeuvres after the scheme should have been carried
into effect, and intending to travel post towards Flanders to meet and
welcome the Princess.

"Pleasant farce for Shrove Tuesday," wrote the secretary of Pecquius, "is
that which the Frenchmen have been arranging down there! He in whose
favour the abduction is to be made was seen going out the same day
spangled and smart, contrary to his usual fashion, making a gambado
towards Saint-Germain-en-Laye with four carriages and four to meet the
nymph."

Great was the King's wrath and mortification at this ridiculous exposure
of his detestable scheme. Vociferous were Villeroy's expressions of
Henry's indignation at being supposed to have had any knowledge of or
complicity in the affair. "His Majesty cannot approve of the means one
has taken to guard against a pretended plot for carrying off the
Princess," said the Secretary of State; "a fear which was simulated by
the Prince in order to defame the King." He added that there was no
reason to suspect the King, as he had never attempted anything of the
sort in his life, and that the Archduke might have removed the Princess
to his palace without sending an army to the hotel of the Prince of
Orange, and causing such an alarm in the city, firing artillery on the
rampart as if the town had been full of Frenchmen in arms, whereas one
was ashamed next morning to find that there had been but fifteen in all.
"But it was all Marquis Spinola's fault," he said, "who wished to show
himself off as a warrior."

The King, having thus through the mouth of his secretary of state warmly
protested against his supposed implication in the attempted abduction,
began as furiously to rail at de Coeuvres for its failure; telling the
Duc de Vendome that his uncle was an idiot, and writing that unlucky
envoy most abusive letters for blundering in the scheme which had been so
well concerted between them. Then he sent for Malherbe, who straightway
perpetrated more poems to express the King's despair, in which Henry was
made to liken himself to a skeleton with a dried skin, and likewise to a
violet turned up by the ploughshare and left to wither.

He kept up through Madame de Berny a correspondence with "his beautiful
angel," as he called the Princess, whom he chose to consider a prisoner
and a victim; while she, wearied to death with the frigid monotony and
sepulchral gaieties of the arch