On the evening of 2nd December, 1720, he was chatting gaily to the young Duchesse de Falari, when he suddenly turned to her and asked:  “Do you think there is any hell—­or Paradise?” “Of course I do,” answered the Duchesse.  “Then are you not afraid to lead the life you do?” “Well,” replied Madame, “I think God will have pity on me.”

Scarcely had the words left her lips when the Regent’s head fell heavily on her shoulder, and he began to slip to the floor.  A glance showed her that he was unconscious; and, rushing out of the room, the terrified Duchesse raced through the dark, deserted corridors of the palace shrieking for help.  When at last help arrived, it came too late.  The Regent had gone to find for himself an answer to the question his lips had framed a few minutes earlier—­“is there any hell—­or Paradise?”

CHAPTER XXI

A DELILAH OF THE COURT OF FRANCE

It was a cruel fate that snatched Gabrielle d’Estrees from the arms of Henri IV., King of France and Navarre, at the moment when her long devotion to her hero-lover was on the eve of being crowned by the bridal veil; and for many a week there was no more stricken man in Europe than the disconsolate King as he wailed in his black-draped chamber, “The root of my love is dead, and will never blossom again.”

No doubt Henri’s grief was as sincere as it was deep, for he had loved his golden-haired Gabrielle of the blue eyes and dimpled baby-cheeks as he had never loved woman before.  It was the passion of a lifetime, the passion of a strong man in his prime, that fate had thus nipped in the fullness of its bloom; and its loss plunged him into an abyss of sorrow and despair such as few men have known.

But with the hero of Ivry no emotion of grief or pleasure ever endured long.  He was a man of erratic, widely contrasted moods—­now on the peaks of happiness, now in the gulf of dejection; one mood succeeding another as inevitably and widely as the pendulum swings.  Thus when he had spent three seemingly endless months of gloom and solitude, reaction seized him, and he flung aside his grief with his black raiment.  He was still in the prime of his strength, with many years before him.  He would drink the cup of life, even to its dregs.  He had long been weary of the matrimonial chains that fettered him to Marguerite of Valois.  He would strike them off, and in another wife and other loves find a new lease of pleasure.

Thus it was with no heavy heart that he turned his back on Fontainebleau and his darkened room, and fared to Paris to find a new vista of pleasure opening to him at his palace doors, and his ears full of the praises of a new divinity who had come, during his absence, to grace his Court—­a girl of such beauty, sprightliness, and wit as his capital had not seen for many a year.