But even at this crisis in her life, Henriette’s stout heart did not fail her for a moment.  “The King may take my life, if he pleases,” she said.  “Everybody will say that he killed his wife; for I was Queen before the Tuscan woman came on the scene at all.”  None knew better than she that she could afford thus to put on a bold front.  Henri was still her slave, to whom her little finger was more than his crown; and she knew that in his hands both her liberty and her life were safe.  And thus it proved; for before she had spent many weeks in the Monastery of Beaumont-les-Tours, its doors were flung open for her, and the first news she heard was that her father was a free man, while her brother’s death-sentence had been commuted to a few years in the Bastille.

Thus Henriette returned to the turbulent life of the palace—­the daily routine of quarrels and peacemaking with the King, and undisguised hostility from the Queen, through all of which Henri’s heart still remained hers.  “How I long to have you in my arms again,” he writes, when on a hunting excursion, which had led him to the scene of their early romance.  “As my letter brings back the memory of the past, I know you will feel that nothing in the present is worth anything in comparison.  This, at least, was my feeling as I walked along the roads I so often traversed in the old days on my journey to your side.  When I sleep I dream of you; when I wake my thoughts are all of you.”  He sends her a million kisses, and vows that all he asks of life is that she shall always love him entirely and him alone.

One would have thought that such a conquest of a King and such triumph over a Queen would have gratified the ambition of the most exacting of women.  But the Marquise de Verneuil seems to have found small satisfaction in her victories.  When she was not provoking quarrels with Henri, which roused him to such a pitch of anger that at times he threatened to strike her, she received his advances with a coldness or a sullen acquiescence calculated to chill the most ardent lover.  In other moods she would drive him to despair by declaring that she had long ceased to love him, and that all she wanted from him was a dowry to carry in marriage to one or other of several suitors who were dying for her hand.

But Madame’s day of triumph was drawing much nearer to an end than she imagined.  The end, in fact, came with dramatic suddenness when Henri first set eyes on the radiantly lovely Charlotte de Montmorency.  Weary at heart of the tempers and exactions of Henriette, it needed but such a lure as this to draw him finally from her side; and from the first flash of Charlotte’s beautiful eyes this most susceptible of Kings was undone.  Madame de Verneuil’s reign was ended; the next quarrel was made the occasion for a complete rupture, and the Court saw her no more.