tiny of this great prince to excite the attention and
admiration of the public in a very modified degree wherever he might be.
Monsieur had fallen into this situation by habit.

It was not, perhaps, this which gave him that air of listlessness.
Monsieur had already been tolerably busy in the course of his life. A
man cannot allow the heads of a dozen of his best friends to be cut
off without feeling a little excitement; and as, since the accession of
Mazarin to power, no heads had been cut off, Monsieur's occupation was
gone, and his _morale_ suffered from it.

The life of the poor prince was then very dull. After his little morning
hawking-party on the banks of the Beuvron, or in the woods of Cheverny,
Monsieur crossed the Loire, went to breakfast at Chambord, with
or without an appetite, and the city of Blois heard no more of its
sovereign lord and master till the next hawking-day.

So much for the ennui _extra muros_; of the ennui of the interior we
will give the reader an idea if he will with us follow the cavalcade to
the majestic porch of the Castle of the States.

Monsieur rode a little steady-paced horse, equipped with a large saddle
of red Flemish velvet, with stirrups in the shape of buskins; the horse
was of a bay color; Monsieur's pourpoint of crimson velvet corresponded
with the cloak of the same shade and the horse's equipment, and it was
only by this red appearance of the whole that the prince could be known
from his two companions, the one dressed in violet, the other in green.
He on the left, in violet, was his equerry; he on the right, in green,
was the grand veneur.

One of the pages carried two gerfalcons upon a perch, the other a
hunting-horn, which he blew with a careless note at twenty paces from
the castle. Every one about this listless prince did what he had to
listlessly.

At this signal, eight guards, who were lounging in the sun in the square
court, ran to their halberts, and Monsieur made his solemn entry into
the castle.

When he had disappeared under the shades of the porch, three or four
idlers, who had followed the cavalcade to the castle, after pointing
out the suspended birds to each other, dispersed with comments upon
what they saw: and, when they were gone, the street, the palace, and the
court, all remained deserted alike.

Monsieur dismounted without speaking a word, went straight to his
apartments, where his valet changed his dress, and as Madame had not
yet sent orders