The lady was just fifteen years of age.  The King was turned of fifty-five.  The disparity of age seemed to make the royal passion ridiculous.  To Henry the situation seemed poetical and pathetic.  After this first interview he never missed a single rehearsal.  In the intervals he called perpetually for the services of the court poet Malherbe, who certainly contrived to perpetrate in his behalf some of the most detestable verses that even he had ever composed.

The nymph was Marguerite de Montmorency, daughter of the Constable of France, and destined one day to become the mother of the great Conde, hero of Rocroy.  There can be no doubt that she was exquisitely beautiful.  Fair-haired, with a complexion of dazzling purity, large expressive eyes, delicate but commanding features, she had a singular fascination of look and gesture, and a winning, almost childlike, simplicity of manner.  Without feminine artifice or commonplace coquetry, she seemed to bewitch and subdue at a glance men of all ranks, ages, and pursuits; kings and cardinals, great generals, ambassadors and statesmen, as well as humbler mortals whether Spanish, Italian, French, or Flemish.  The Constable, an ignorant man who, as the King averred, could neither write nor read, understood as well as more learned sages the manners and humours of the court.  He had destined his daughter for the young and brilliant Bassompierre, the most dazzling of all the cavaliers of the day.  The two were betrothed.

But the love-stricken Henry, then confined to his bed with the gout, sent for the chosen husband of the beautiful Margaret.

“Bassompierre, my friend,” said the aged king, as the youthful lover knelt before him at the bedside, “I have become not in love, but mad, out of my senses, furious for Mademoiselle de Montmorency.  If she should love you, I should hate you.  If she should love me, you would hate me.  ’Tis better that this should not be the cause of breaking up our good intelligence, for I love you with affection and inclination.  I am resolved to marry her to my nephew the Prince of Conde, and to keep her near my family.  She will be the consolation and support of my old age into which I am now about to enter.  I shall give my nephew, who loves the chase a thousand times better than he does ladies, 100,000 livres a year, and I wish no other favour from her than her affection without making further pretensions.”

It was eight o’clock of a black winter’s morning, and the tears as he spoke ran down the cheeks of the hero of Ivry and bedewed the face of the kneeling Bassompierre.

The courtly lover sighed and—­obeyed.  He renounced the hand of the beautiful Margaret, and came daily to play at dice with the King at his bedside with one or two other companions.

And every day the Duchess of Angouleme, sister of the Constable, brought her fair niece to visit and converse with the royal invalid.  But for the dark and tragic clouds which were gradually closing around that eventful and heroic existence there would be something almost comic in the spectacle of the sufferer making the palace and all France ring with the howlings of his grotesque passion for a child of fifteen as he lay helpless and crippled with the gout.