On arriving beneath the porch of the Castle of the States, the king met,
surrounded by his guards and gentlemen, with S. A. R. the duke, Gaston of
Orleans, whose physiognomy, naturally rather majestic, had borrowed on
this solemn occasion a fresh luster and a fresh dignity. On her part,
Madame, dressed in her robes of ceremony, awaited, in the interior
balcony, the entrance of her nephew. All the windows of the old castle,
so deserted and dismal on ordinary days, were resplendent with ladies and
lights.

It was then to the sound of drums, trumpets, and _vivats_, that the young
king crossed the threshold of that castle in which, seventy-two years
before, Henry III. had called in the aid of assassination and treachery
to keep upon his head and in his house a crown which was already slipping
from his brow, to fall into another family.

All eyes, after having admired the young king, so handsome and so
agreeable, sought for that other king of France, much otherwise king than
the former, and so old, so pale, so bent, that people called the Cardinal
Mazarin.

Louis was at this time endowed with all the natural gifts which make the
perfect gentleman; his eye was brilliant, mild, and of a clear azure
blue. But the most skillful physiognomists, those divers into the soul,
on fixing their looks upon it, if it had been possible for a subject to
sustain the glance of the king, - the most skillful physiognomists, we
say, would never have been able to fathom the depths of that abyss of
mildness. It was with the eyes of the king as with the immense depths of
the azure heavens, or with those more terrific, and almost as sublime,
which the Mediterranean reveals under the keels of its ships in a clear