Visconti in like manner waited upon the Princess of Orange; other nobles attending to the other ladies.  Forty-eight pages in white, yellow, and red scarves brought and removed the dishes.  The dinner, of courses innumerable, lasted two hours and a half, and the ladies, being thus fortified for the more serious business of the evening, were led to the tiring-rooms while the hall was made ready for dancing.  The ball was opened by the Princess of Conde and Spinola, and lasted until two in the morning.  As the apartment grew warm, two of the pages went about with long staves and broke all the windows until not a single pane of glass remained.  The festival was estimated by the thrifty chronicler of Antwerp to have cost from 3000 to 4000 crowns.  It was, he says, “an earthly paradise of which soon not a vapour remained.”  He added that he gave a detailed account of it “not because he took pleasure in such voluptuous pomp and extravagance, but that one might thus learn the vanity of the world.”  These courtesies and assiduities on the part of the great “shopkeeper,” as the Constable called him, had so much effect, if not on the Princess, at least on Conde himself, that he threatened to throw his wife out of window if she refused to caress Spinola.  These and similar accusations were made by the father and aunt when attempting to bring about a divorce of the Princess from her husband.  The Nuncius Bentivoglio, too, fell in love with her, devoting himself to her service, and his facile and eloquent pen to chronicling her story.  Even poor little Philip of Spain in the depths of the Escurial heard of her charms, and tried to imagine himself in love with her by proxy.

Thenceforth there was a succession of brilliant festivals in honour of the Princess.  The Spanish party was radiant with triumph, the French maddened with rage.  Henry in Paris was chafing like a lion at bay.  A petty sovereign whom he could crush at one vigorous bound was protecting the lady for whose love he was dying.  He had secured Conde’s exclusion from Holland, but here were the fugitives splendidly established in Brussels; the Princess surrounded by most formidable suitors, the Prince encouraged in his rebellious and dangerous schemes by the power which the King most hated on earth, and whose eternal downfall he had long since sworn to accomplish.

For the weak and frivolous Conde began to prattle publicly of his deep projects of revenge.  Aided by Spanish money and Spanish troops he would show one day who was the real heir to the throne of France—­the illegitimately born Dauphin or himself.

The King sent for the first president of Parliament, Harlay, and consulted with him as to the proper means of reviving the suppressed process against the Dowager and of publicly degrading Conde from his position of first prince of the blood which he had been permitted to usurp.  He likewise procured a decree accusing him of high-treason and ordering him to be punished at his Majesty’s pleasure, to be prepared by the Parliament of Paris; going down to the court himself in his impatience and seating himself in everyday costume on the bench of judges to see that it was immediately proclaimed.