bridge of Notre Dame, well pleased at the sight of all the people crying
loudly 'Live the King!' And, it was laughingly, hat in hand, that he bowed
to the ladies and demoiselles. Behind him was a flag of lilies. A little
in advance, in a magnificent litter, was Gabrielle covered with jewels so
brilliant that they offended (offusquoient) the lights."

However much or little the gems then affected the lights, later they
pleased the Medician Marie. She draped herself with them. In the interim a
divorce had been got from Margot. Death had brought another from
Gabrielle. The latter divorce poison probably facilitated. Gabrielle,
through the sheer insolence of her luxury had made herself hated by the
poverty-stricken Parisians. The detail is unimportant. There was another
hatred that she had aroused. Not Henri's however. When she died he
declared that the root of his love, dead with her, would never grow
again--only to find it as flourishing as ever, flourishing for this woman,
flourishing for that, budding ceaselessly in tropic profusion, until the
dagger put by Marie in the hand of Ravaillac, extirpated it, but not its
blossoms, which reflowered at Whitehall.

Henri's daughter, Henriette de France, was mother of Charles the Second.

The latter's advent in Puritan England effected a transformation for which
history has no parallel. In the excesses of sanctimoniousness in which the
whole country swooned, it was as though piety had been a domino and the
Restoration the stroke of twelve. In the dropping of masks the world
beheld a nation of sinners where a moment before had been a congregation
of saints.

Previously, in the Elizabethan age, social conditions had made up in
winsomeness what they lacked in severity. Whitehall, under James, became a
replica, art deducted, of the hermaphroditisms of the Valois court.
Thereafter the quasi-divinity of the sovereign evaporated in a contempt
that endured unsatiated until Charles I, who had discovered that a king
can do no wrong, discovered that he could lose his head. In the amputation
a crown fell which Cromwell disdained to gather. Meanwhile the false
spirit of false godliness that generated British cant and American
hypocrisy made a nation, as it made New England, glum. In Parliament where
a Bible lay open for reference, it was resolved, that no person should be
admitted to public service of whose piety the House was not assured. In
committees of ways and means, members asked each