The first independent act of the Duc de Vendome had thus greatly injured him in the estimation of the young monarch and his mother; nor did his afterlife tend to give them cause to alter the opinion which they then formed either as regarded his stability or his capacity.  Even the marriage which his father, Henri IV, had with so much difficulty contracted for him with the heiress of the House of Mercoeur,[174] failed to produce the result that had been anticipated, as he squandered her wealth, without increasing his own political importance.[175]

On her triumphant return to the capital Marie de Medicis was apprised of the death of the Prince de Conti, which had taken place on the 13th of August; but the void was little felt, the infirmities under which he laboured, and the weakness of his intellect, having, despite his exalted rank, rendered him a mere cipher at the Court.  By the nation his loss was totally unfelt; while this indifference was shared by his wife, whose violent passion for Bassompierre had long been notorious, and who shortly afterwards privately gave him her hand.  Mademoiselle d’Entragues, the sister of the Marquise de Verneuil, to whom he had previously been betrothed, and who had made him the father of a son,[176] had in vain endeavoured in the law courts to compel him to fulfil his contract, and persisted in bearing his name; a fact which was so well known as to induce many persons to believe that she was in reality his wife.  On one occasion, when he was in attendance upon the Queen, the royal carriage was detained for a moment by the crowd near that of Mademoiselle d’Entragues, whom Marie immediately recognized.  “See,” she said with a malicious smile, as she pointed towards the lady with her fan, “there is Madame de Bassompierre.”

“That is merely a nom de guerre, Madame,” was the ready reply, uttered in a tone sufficiently loud to reach the ears of the person named, who angrily exclaimed: 

“You are a fool, Bassompierre!”

“If I be not,” was the quiet rejoinder of the ungallant Lothario, “it has at least, Madame, not been your fault.” [177]

Thus, after his union with the Princesse de Conti, Bassompierre, although claimed as a husband by two celebrated women, the one of a family notorious for the profligacy of its members, and the other a daughter of the proud house of Guise and, moreover, the widow of a Prince of the Blood, still continued to assume the privileges of a bachelor; resolutely disowning the one, while the other did not dare publicly to declare her marriage.[178]

A fortnight after the return of the Court to Paris it was followed by the Prince de Conde, who had been summoned to attend the sovereign to Parliament on the termination of his minority, which ended when he entered his thirteenth year.  On the 1st of October, the day preceding that on which the ceremony of his recognition as actual monarch of France was to take place, Louis XIII issued a declaration confirmatory