ever sat on the throne of France, had a heart as weak in love as it was
stout in war. To his last day he was a veritable coward before the
battery of bright eyes; and before Ravaillac's dagger brought his career
to a tragic end one May day in the year 1610 he had counted his
mistresses to as many as the years he had lived.

But of them all, fifty-seven of them--for the most part lightly coming
and lightly going--only one ever really reached his heart, and was
within measurable distance of a seat on his throne--the woman to whom he
wrote in the hey-day of his passion, "Never has man loved as I love you.
If any sacrifice of mine could purchase your happiness, how gladly I
would make it, even to the last drop of my life's blood."

Gabrielle d'Estrées who thus enslaved the heart of the hero, which
carried him to a throne through a hundred fights and inconceivable
hardships, was cradled one day in the year 1573 in Touraine. From her
mother, Françoise Babou, she inherited both beauty and frailness; for
the Babou women were famous alike for their loveliness and for a virtue
as facile even as that of Marie Gaudin, the pretty plaything of François
I., who left François' arms to find a husband in Philip Babou and thus
to transmit her charms and frailty to Gabrielle.

Her father, Antoine, son of Jean d'Estrées, a valiant soldier under five
kings, was a man of pleasure, who drank and sang his way through life,
preferring Cupid to Mars and the _joie de vivre_ to the call of duty. It
is perhaps little wonder that Antoine's wife, after bearing seven
children to her husband, left him to find at least more loyalty in the
Marquess of Tourel-Alégre, a lover twenty years younger than herself.

Thus it was that, deserted by her mother, and with a father too addicted