s, trumpets, and vivats, that the young
king crossed the threshold of that castle in which, seventy-two years
before, Henry III. had called in the aid of assassination and treachery
to keep upon his head and in his house a crown which was already
slipping from his brow, to fall into another family.

All eyes, after having admired the young king, so handsome and so
agreeable, sought for that other king of France, much otherwise king
than the former, and so old, so pale, so bent, that people called him
the Cardinal Mazarin.

Louis was at this time endowed with all the natural gifts which make
the perfect gentleman; his eye was brilliant, mild, and of a clear azure
blue. But the most skillful physiognomists, those divers into the soul,
on fixing their looks upon it, if it had been possible for a subject to
sustain the glance of the king,--the most skillful physiognomists, we
say, would never have been able to fathom the depths of that abyss of
mildness. It was with the eyes of the king as with the immense depths of
the azure heavens, or with those more terrific, and almost as sublime,
which the Mediterranean reveals under the keels of its ships in a
clear summer day, a gigantic mirror in which heaven delights to reflect
sometimes its stars, sometimes its storms.

The king was short of stature--he was scarcely five feet two inches: but
his youth made up for this defect, set off likewise by great nobleness
in all his movements, and by considerable address in all bodily
exercises.

Certes, he was already quite a king, and it was a great thing to be a
king in that period of traditional devotedness and respect; but as,
up to that time, he had been but seldom and always poorly shown to the
people, as they to whom he was shown saw him by the side of his mother,
a tall woman, and monsieur le cardinal, a man of commanding presence,
many found him so little of a king as to say,--

"Why, the king is not so tall as monsieur le cardinal!"

Whatever may be thought of these physical observations, which were
principally made in the capital, the young king was welcomed as a god by
the inhabitants of Blois, and almost like a king by his uncle and aunt,
Monsieur and Madame, the inhabitants of the castle.

It must, however, be allowed, that when he saw, in the hall of
reception, chairs of equal height placed for himself, his mother, the
cardinal, and his uncle and aunt, a disposition artfully concealed by
the semicircular form of the