The marriage-contract was actually sealed before the King had any suspicion that his hand was being disposed of, and it was only when Sully one day entered his study with the startling words, “Sire, we have been marrying you,” that the awakening came.  For a few moments Henri sat as a man stunned, his head buried in his hands; then, with a deep sigh, he spoke:  “If God orders it so, so let it be.  There seems to be no escape; since you say that it is necessary for my kingdom and my subjects, why, marry I must.”

It was a strange predicament in which Henri now found himself.  Still more infatuated than ever with Henriette, he was to be tied for life to a Princess whom he had never even seen.  To add to the embarrassment of his position, the condition of his marriage promise to Henriette was already on the way to fulfilment; and he was thus pledged to wed her as strongly as any State compact could bind him to stand at the altar with Marie de Medicis.  One thing was clear, he must at any cost recover that fatal document; and, while he was giving orders for the suitable reception of his new Queen, and arranging for her triumphal progress to Paris, he was writing to Henriette and her parents demanding the return of his promise of marriage agreement—­to her, a pleading letter in which he prays her “to return the promise you have by you and not to compel me to have recourse to other means in order to obtain it”; to her father, a more imperious demand to which he expects instant obedience.

As some consolation to his mistress, whose alternate tears, rage, and reproaches drove him to distraction, he creates her Marquise de Verneuil and promises that, if he should be unable to marry her, he will at least give her a husband of Royal rank, the Due de Nevers, who was eager to make her his wife.

But pleadings and threats alike fail to secure the return of the fatal document, and Henri is reduced to despair, until Henriette gives birth to a dead child and his promise thus becomes of as little value as the paper it was written on.  The condition has failed, and he is a free man to marry his Tuscan Princess, while Henriette, thus foiled in her great ambition, is in danger not only of losing her coveted crown, but her place in the King’s favour.  The days of her wilful autocracy are ended; and, though her heart is full of anger and disappointment, she writes to him a pitiful letter imploring him still to love her and not to cast her “from the Heaven to which he has raised her, down to the earth where he found her.”  “Do not let your wedding festivities be the funeral of my hopes,” she writes.  “Do not banish me from your Royal presence and your heart.  I speak in sighs to you, my King, my lover, my all—­I, who have been loved by the earth’s greatest monarch, and am willing to be his mistress and his servant.”

To such humility was the proud, arrogant beauty now reduced.  She was an abject suppliant where she had reigned a Queen.  Nor did her pleadings fall on deaf ears.  Her Royal lover’s hand was given, against his will, to his new Queen, but his heart, he vowed, was all Henriette’s—­so much so that he soon installed her in sumptuous rooms in his palace adjoining those of the Queen herself.