she accordingly gave to the chapel attached to the convent the name of the Chapel of Praise, while the house itself was designated the Monastery of the Holy Trinity.  It was no sooner built than it was given by the foundress to the reformed and bare-footed Fathers of St. Augustine; but after having solicited in their favour various privileges which were accorded by the Sovereign-Pontiff, she dispossessed them in the year 1613, and established in their place the Augustine Fathers of the Congregation of Bourges.

Meanwhile the influence of Concini and his wife over the mind of the Queen unhappily increased with time, until the arrogance of the former became so great that he had the insolence to enter the lists at a grand tilting at the ring which was publicly held in the Rue St. Antoine in the presence of the monarch and his Court; a piece of presumption which was rendered still more unpalatable to Henry by the fact that the Italian, who was well skilled in such exercises, bore away the prize for which the whole of his own nobility had contended.

So arrogant, indeed, had he become, and so inflated with the consciousness of wealth—­Marie de Medicis having been lavish even beyond her means both to his wife and himself—­that he entered into a negotiation for the purchase of La Ferte, a property estimated at between two and three hundred thousand crowns; and he no sooner ascertained that the Duchesse de Sully had waited upon the Queen to entreat of her Majesty to forbid the transfer, as such an acquisition made by an individual who was generally known to be penniless only a few years previously would necessarily excite the public disaffection towards herself, than he had the audacity to proceed to the Arsenal and to upbraid that lady for her interference in the most unmeasured and insulting terms, declaring that he was independent both of the King of France and of his subjects, whatever might be their sex and rank; and that whoever thwarted him in his projects might live to rue the day in which they braved his anger.

This intemperance having come to the ears of the King, his indignation was excessive; but, as on previous occasions, he lacked the moral courage to assert his dignity; and satisfied himself by bitter complaints to Sully of the fatal hold which her two Italian attendants had secured upon the affections of the Queen, and by replying to the reproaches of Marie upon the subject of his new attachment for Charlotte des Essarts, and the continued insolence of Madame de Verneuil, with vehement upbraidings on the vassalage in which she lived to the indecent caprices and shameless extortions of a waiting-woman and her husband.