Sully remonstrated. He was obliged to rise at three the next morning,
he said, enumerating pressing and most important work which Henry
required to be completed with all possible haste. "The King said you
would be very angry," replied Praslin; "but there is no help for it.
Come you must, for the man you know of has gone out of the country, as
you said he would, and has carried away the lady on the crupper behind
him."

"Ho, ho," said the Duke, "I am wanted for that affair, am I?" And the
two proceeded straightway to the Louvre, and were ushered, of all
apartments in the world, into the Queen's bedchamber. Mary de' Medici
had given birth only four days before to an infant, Henrietta Maria,
future queen of Charles I. of England. The room was crowded with
ministers and courtiers; Villeroy, the Chancellor, Bassompierre, and
others, being stuck against the wall at small intervals like statues,
dumb, motionless, scarcely daring to breathe. The King, with his hands
behind him and his grey beard sunk on his breast, was pacing up and down
the room in a paroxysm of rage and despair.

"Well," said he, turning to Sully as he entered, "our man has gone off
and carried everything with him. What do you say to that?"

The Duke beyond the boding "I told you so" phrase of consolation which
he was entitled to use, having repeatedly warned his sovereign that
precisely this catastrophe was impending, declined that night to offer
advice. He insisted on sleeping on it. The manner in which the
proceedings of the King at this juncture would be regarded by the
Archdukes Albert and Isabella--for there could be no doubt that Conde had
escaped to their territory--and by the King of Spain, in complicity with