Provence, entered the city amidst shouts of Hurrah for the king!
"Now I am king!" cried Henry, on receiving the news, so generally was
Marseilles even then regarded as the queen of the Mediterranean. The
Duke of Epernon, who had attempted to make of Provence an independent
principality for himself, was obliged to leave it and treat with the
king, ever ready to grant easy terms to those who could give up to him or
sell him any portion of his kingdom. France was thus being rapidly
reconstituted. "Since the month of January, 1596, Burgundy, parts of
Forez, Auvergne, and Velay, the whole of Provence, half Languedoc, and
the last town of Poitou had been brought back to their allegiance to the
king. French territory and national unity had nothing more to wait for,
to complete their re-establishment, than a portion of Brittany and four
towns of Picardy still occupied by the Spaniards." [Poirson, _Histoire
du Regne de Henri IV., t. ii. p. 159.]

But these results were only obtained at enormous expense and by means of
pecuniary sacrifices, loans, imposts, obligations of every sort, which
left the king in inextricable embarrassment, and France in a condition of
exhaustion still further aggravated by the deplorable administration of
the public finances. On the 15th of April, 1596, Henry IV. wrote from
Amiens to Rosny, "My friend, you know as well as any of my servants what
troubles, labors, and fatigues I have had to go through to secure my life
and my dignity against so many sorts of enemies and perils. Nevertheless
I swear to you that all these traverses have not caused me so much
affliction and bitterness of spirit as the sorrow and annoyance I now
feel at finding thyself in continual controversies with those most in
authority of my servants, officers, and councillors of state, when I
would fain set about restoring this kingdom to its highest splendor, and
relieving my poor people, whom I love as my dear children (God having at
present granted me no others), from so many talliages, subsidies,
vexations, and oppressions whereof they daily make complaints to me.
. . . Having written to them who are of my council of finance how that
I had a design of extreme importance in hand for which I had need of a
fund of eight hundred thousand crowns, and therefore I begged and
conjured them, by their loyalty and sincere affection towards me and
France, to labor diligently for the certain raising of that sum, all
their answers, a