Love affairs of the Courts of Europe by Thornton Hall
page 32 of 290 (11%)
page 32 of 290 (11%)
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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 |
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