But it was not all sunshine for the lovers.  Paris was in the throes of famine and plague and flood.  Poverty and discontent stalked through her streets, and there were scowling and envious eyes to greet the King and his lady when they rode laughing by; or when, as on one occasion we read of, they returned from a hunting excursion, riding side by side, “she sitting astride dressed all in green” and holding the King’s hand.

Nor within the palace walls was it all a bed of roses for Gabrielle; for she had her enemies there; and chief among them the powerful Duc de Sully, her most formidable rival in the King’s affection.  Sully was not only Henri’s favourite minister; he was the Jonathan to his David, the man who had shared a hundred dangers by his side, and by his devotion and affection had found a firm lodging in his heart.

Between the minister and the mistress, each consumed with jealousy of the other, Henri had many a bad hour; and the climax came when de Sully refused to pass the extravagant charges for the baptism of the Marquise’s second son, Alexander.  Gabrielle was indignant and appealed angrily and tearfully to the King, who supported his minister.  “I have loved you,” he said at last, roused to wrath, “because I thought you gentle and sweet and yielding; now that I have raised you to high position, I find you exacting and domineering.  Know this, I could better spare a dozen mistresses like you than one minister so devoted to me as Sully.”

At these harsh words, Gabrielle burst into tears.  “If I had a dagger,” she exclaimed, “I would plunge it into my heart, and then you would find your image there.”  And when Henri rushed from the room, she ran after him, flung herself at his feet, and with heart-breaking sobs, begged for forgiveness and a kind word.  Such troubles as these, however, were but as the clouds that come and go in a summer sky.  Gabrielle’s sun was now nearing its zenith; Henri had long intended to make her his wife at the altar; proceedings for divorce from his wife, Marguerite de Valois, were running smoothly; and now the crowning day in the two lives thus romantically linked was at hand.

In the month of April, 1599, Gabrielle and Henri were spending the last ante-nuptial days together at Fontainebleau; the wedding was fixed for the first Sunday after Easter, and Gabrielle was ideally happy among her wedding finery and the costly presents that had been showered on her from all parts of France—­from the ring Henri had worn at his Coronation and which he was to place on her finger at the altar, to a statue of the King in gold from Lyons, and a “giant piece of amber in a silver casket from Bordeaux.”

Her wedding-dress was a gorgeous robe of Spanish velvet, rich in embroideries of gold and silver; the suite of rooms which was to be hers as Queen was already ready, with its splendours of crimson and gold furnishing.  The greatest ladies in France were now proud to act as her tire-women; and princes and ambassadors flocked to Fontainebleau to pay her homage.