favourite stood beside the steps to assist her to descend, the unhappy Vermond shot him through the head, and then, turning his horse towards the gate of St. Denis, endeavoured to make his escape.  He was, however, too ill-mounted to succeed in this attempt, the carriage of the ex-Queen having been followed by many of the nobles who were anxious to propitiate the favour of the King by so easy a display of respect to the dethroned Marguerite; and ere he reached the barrier the wretched young man found himself a prisoner.

The body of his victim had, meanwhile, been conveyed to an apartment on the ground floor of the hotel, where on his arrival he was immediately confronted with it; but no sign of remorse or regret was visible as he gazed upon the corpse.  “Turn it over,” he said huskily, after he had gazed for awhile upon the glazed eyes and the parted lips.  “Let me see if he be really dead.”  His request was complied with; and as he became convinced that life had indeed departed from the already stiffening form, he exclaimed joyfully:  “It is well—­I have not failed—­my task is accomplished.  Had it been otherwise I could yet have repaired the error.”

When this scene was reported to Marguerite, who, absorbed in the most passionate grief, had retired to her appartment, she vowed that she would not touch food until she had vengeance on the murderer; and she kept her word, as she persisted in her resolution till, on the third day after he had committed the crime, the unhappy young man was decapitated in front of the house, and almost upon the very spot still reeking with the blood of his victim.  But the nerves of the ex-Queen could endure no further tension; and on the morrow she removed to a new residence in the Faubourg St. Germain, where she was shortly afterwards visited by Bassompierre, who was charged with the condolences of the King on her late loss.[308]

This fact alone tends more fully to develop the manners and morals (?) of the age than a thousand comments; and thus we have considered it our duty to place it upon record.

Meanwhile M. de Saint-Julien was far from having been the only favourite of the profligate Marguerite, who divided her time between devotional exercises and the indulgence of those guilty pleasures to which she was so unhappily addicted; but while the citizens were not slow to remark her excesses, she gained the love of the poor by a profuse alms-giving, and enjoyed a perfect impunity of action from the real or feigned ignorance of the King relative to the private arrangements of her household.  She was, moreover, the avowed patroness of men of letters, by whom her table was constantly surrounded; and in whose society she took so much delight that she acquired, by this constant intercourse with the most learned individuals of the capital, a facility not only of expression, but also of composition, very remarkable in one of her sex at that period.[309] Carefully avoiding all political