the
attention of spectators, if spectators there had been; but the good
citizens of Blois could not pardon Monsieur for having chosen their gay
city for an abode in which to indulge melancholy at his ease, and as
often as they caught a glimpse of the illustrious ennuye, they stole
away gaping, or drew back their heads into the interior of their
dwellings, to escape the soporific influence of that long pale face, of
those watery eyes, and that languid address; so that the worthy prince
was almost certain to find the streets deserted whenever he chanced to
pass through them.

Now, on the part of the citizens of Blois this was a culpable piece of
disrespect, for Monsieur was, after the king--nay, even, perhaps before
the king--the greatest noble of the kingdom. In fact, God, who had
granted to Louis XIV., then reigning, the honor of being son of Louis
XIII., had granted to Monsieur the honor of being son of Henry IV. It
was not then, or, at least it ought not to have been, a trifling source
of pride for the city of Blois, that Gaston of Orleans had chosen it as
his residence, and he his court in the ancient castle of its states.

But it was the destiny of this great prince to excite the attention and
admiration of the public in a very modified degree wherever he might be.
Monsieur had fallen into this situation by habit.

It was not, perhaps, this which gave him that air of listlessness.
Monsieur had been tolerably busy in the course of his life. A man cannot
allow the heads of a dozen of his best friends to be cut off without
feeling a little excitement, and as, since the accession of Mazarin to
power, no heads had been cut off, Monsieur's occupation was gone, and
his morale suffered from it.

The life of the poor prince was, then, very dull. After his little
morning hawking-party on the banks of the Beuvion, or in the woods of
Chiverny, Monsieur crossed the Loire, went to breakfast at Chambord,
with or without an appetite and the city of Blois heard no more of its
sovereign lord and master till the next hawking-day.

So much for the ennui extra muros; of the ennui of the interior we will
give the reader an idea if he will with us follow the cavalcade to the
majestic porch of the castle of the states.

Monsieur rode a little steady-paced horse, equipped with a large saddle
of red Flemish velvet, with stirrups in the shape of buskins; the horse
was of a bay color; Monsieur's pourpoint of crimson velvet corresponded