The last days of Holy Week it had been arranged that she should spend in devotion at Paris, and Henri was her escort the greater part of the way.  When they parted on the banks of the Seine they wept in each other’s arms, while Gabrielle, full of nameless forebodings, clung to her lover and begged him to take her back to Fontainebleau.  But with a final embrace he tore himself away; and with streaming eyes Gabrielle continued her journey, full of fears as to its issue; for had not a seer of Piedmont told her that the marriage would never take place; and other diviners, whom she had consulted, warned her that she would die young, and never call Henri husband?

Two days later Gabrielle heard Mass at the Church 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.