cy. Weary
at heart of the tempers and exactions of Henriette, it needed but such a
lure as this to draw him finally from her side; and from the first
flash of Charlotte's beautiful eyes this most susceptible of Kings was
undone. Madame de Verneuil's reign was ended; the next quarrel was made
the occasion for a complete rupture, and the Court saw her no more.

Already she had lost the bloom of her beauty; she had grown stout and
coarse through her excessive fondness for the pleasures of the table,
and the rest of her days, which were passed in friendless isolation, she
spent in indulging appetites, which added to her mountain of flesh while
robbing her of the last trace of good-looks. When the knife of Ravaillac
brought Henri's life and his new romance to a tragic end, the Marquise
was among those who were suspected of inspiring the assassin's blow; and
although her guilt was never proved, the taint of suspicion clung to her
to her last day.

After fruitless angling for a husband--the Duc de Guise, the Prince de
Joinville, and many another who, with one consent, fled from her
advances, she resigned herself to a life of obscurity and gluttony,
until death came, one day in the year 1633, to release her from a world
of vanity and disillusionment.

CHAPTER XXII

THE "SUN-KING" AND THE WIDOW

Search where you will in the record of Kings, you will find nowhere a
figure more splendid and more impressive than that of the fourteenth
Louis, who for more then seventy years ruled over France, and for more
than fifty eclipsed in glory his fellow-sovereigns as the sun pales the
stars. Nearly two centuries have gone since he closed his weary and
disillusioned eyes on the world he had so long dominated; but to-day he
shines in history in the galaxy of monarchs with a lustre almost as
great as when he was hailed throughout the world as the "Sun-King," and
in his pride exclaimed, "_I_ am the State."

Placed, like his successor, on the greatest throne in Europe, a child of
five, fortune exhausted itself in lavishing gifts on him. The world was
at his feet almost before he had learned to walk. He grew to manhood
amid the adulation and flatteries of the greatest men and the fairest of
women. And that he might lack no great gift, he was dowered with every
physical perfection that should go to the making of a King.

There was no more goodly youth in France than Louis when he first
practised the arts of love-making, in which he