It was not, perhaps, this which gave him that air of listlessness.
Monsieur had already been tolerably busy in the course of his life. A
man cannot allow the heads of a dozen of his best friends to be cut off
without feeling a little excitement; and as, since the accession of
Mazarin to power, no heads had been cut off, Monsieur's occupation was
gone, and his _morale_ suffered from it.

The life of the poor prince was then very dull. After his little morning
hawking-party on the banks of the Beuvron, or in the woods of Cheverny,
Monsieur crossed the Loire, went to breakfast at Chambord, with or
without an appetite, and the city of Blois heard no more of its sovereign
lord and master till the next hawking-day.

So much for the ennui _extra muros_; of the ennui of the interior we will
give the reader an idea if he will with us follow the cavalcade to the
majestic porch of the Castle of the States.

Monsieur rode a little steady-paced horse, equipped with a large saddle
of red Flemish velvet, with stirrups in the shape of buskins; the horse
was of a bay color; Monsieur's pourpoint of crimson velvet corresponded
with the cloak of the same shade and the horse's equipment, and it was
only by this red appearance of the whole that the prince could be known
from his two companions, the one dressed in violet, the other in green.
He on the left, in violet, was his equerry; he on the right, in green,
was the grand veneur.

One of the pages carried two gerfalcons upon a perch, the other a
hunting-horn, which he blew with a careless note at twenty paces from the
castle. Every one about this listless prince did what he had to