the other, Henri had many a bad hour; and the climax came when de Sully
refused to pass the extravagant charges for the baptism of the
Marquise's second son, Alexander. Gabrielle was indignant and appealed
angrily and tearfully to the King, who supported his minister. "I have
loved you," he said at last, roused to wrath, "because I thought you
gentle and sweet and yielding; now that I have raised you to high
position, I find you exacting and domineering. Know this, I could better
spare a dozen mistresses like you than one minister so devoted to me as
Sully."

At these harsh words, Gabrielle burst into tears. "If I had a dagger,"
she exclaimed, "I would plunge it into my heart, and then you would find
your image there." And when Henri rushed from the room, she ran after
him, flung herself at his feet, and with heart-breaking sobs, begged for
forgiveness and a kind word. Such troubles as these, however, were but
as the clouds that come and go in a summer sky. Gabrielle's sun was now
nearing its zenith; Henri had long intended to make her his wife at the
altar; proceedings for divorce from his wife, Marguerite de Valois, were
running smoothly; and now the crowning day in the two lives thus
romantically linked was at hand.

In the month of April, 1599, Gabrielle and Henri were spending the last
ante-nuptial days together at Fontainebleau; the wedding was fixed for
the first Sunday after Easter, and Gabrielle was ideally happy among her
wedding finery and the costly presents that had been showered on her
from all parts of France--from the ring Henri had worn at his Coronation
and which he was to place on her finger at the altar, to a statue of the
King in gold from Lyons, and a "giant piece of amber in a silver casket
from Bordeaux."