er were absorbed. The new-born tenderness lately
exhibited by her husband had gradually diminished; while the assumption
of the favourite, who was once more in her turn about to become a
mother, exceeded all decent limits. The daily and almost hourly disputes
between the royal couple were renewed with greater bitterness than ever,
and when, on the 21st of January, Madame de Verneuil, like herself, and
again under the same roof, gave birth to a daughter,[210] Marie de
Medicis no longer attempted to suppress the violence of her indignation;
nor was it until the King, alike chafed and bewildered by her
upbraidings, declared that should she persist in rendering his existence
one of perpetual turmoil and discomfort he would fulfil his former
threat of compelling her to quit the kingdom, that he could induce her
to desist from receiving him with complaints and reproaches. Henry was
aware that he had discovered, by the assertion of this resolve, a
certain method of silencing his unfortunate consort, who, had she been
childless, would in all probability gladly have sacrificed her ambition
to her sense of dignity; but Marie was a mother, and she felt that her
own destiny must be blended with that of her offspring. Thus she had
nothing left to her save to submit; and deeply as she suffered from the
indignities which were heaped upon her as a wife, she shrank from a
prospect so appalling as a separation from the innocent beings to whom
she had given life.

Meanwhile the King, wearied alike of the exigencies of his mistress and
the cold, unbending deportment of the Queen, again made approaches to
Mademoiselle de Guise, upon whom he had already, a year or two
previously, lavished all those attentions which bespoke alike his
admiration and his designs; but he was not destined to be more
successful with this lady than before, her intimacy with the Queen, to
whose household she was attached, rendering her still more averse than
formerly to encourage the licentious addresses of the monarch. The
excitement of this new passion nevertheless sufficed for a time to wean
him from his old favourite; and forgetting his age in his anxiety to win
the favour of the beautiful and witty Marguerite, he appeared on the
19th of February in a rich suit of white satin in the court of the
Tuileries, where he had invited the nobles of his Court to run at the
ring, and acquitted himself so dexterously that he twice carried it off
amid the acclamations of th