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By Root 1146 0

duke, in exasperation, would commit some folly. She had already decided to receive him and beg him to go away at once, when, on the very evening of that decision, Mme Bonacieux, who had been entrusted with finding the duke and bringing him to the Louvre, was abducted. For two days they had no idea what had become of her, and everything remained in suspense. But once she was free, once she was back in touch with La Porte, things had taken their course again, and she had just accomplished the perilous enterprise that, without her arrest, would have been carried out three days earlier.

Buckingham, left alone, went up to a mirror. This musketeer’s outfit suited him perfectly.

At thirty-five, as he then was, he rightly passed for the most handsome gentleman and the most elegant cavalier in France and England.

The favorite of two kings, rich by millions, all-powerful in a kingdom that he stirred up at his whim and calmed at his caprice, George Villiers, duke of Buckingham, had undertaken one of those fabulous existences that remain over the course of the centuries as an astonishment to posterity.

And so, sure of himself, convinced of his power, certain that the laws which ruled other men could not touch him, he went straight to the goal he had set himself, even if that goal was so high and so dazzling that it would have been folly for another man merely to conceive of it. It was thus that he had happened to approach the beautiful and proud Anne d’Autriche several times and to make her love him, by dint of bedazzlement.

George Villiers thus stood before the mirror, as we have said, restored the waves to his handsome blond hair, which had been flattened by the weight of his hat, twirled his mustache, and, his heart swelling with joy, proud and happy to have reached the moment he had so long desired, smiled to himself in pride and hope.

At that moment, a door hidden in the tapestry opened, and a woman appeared. Buckingham saw this apparition in the mirror. He gave a cry: it was the queen.

Anne d’Autriche was then twenty-six or twenty-seven; that is, she was in the full radiance of her beauty.

Her step was that of a queen or a goddess; her eyes, which gave off glints of emerald, were perfectly beautiful, and full at once of mildness and of majesty.

Her mouth was small and bright red, and though her lower lip, as with the princes of the house of Austria, protruded slightly beyond the upper, she was eminently gracious in her smile, but also deeply disdainful in her scorn.

Her skin was much mentioned for its velvet softness, her hands and arms were of a surprising beauty, and all the poets of the time sang of them as incomparable.

Finally, her hair, which had been blond in her youth but had turned chestnut, and which she wore curled and very fluffy, and with much powder, admirably framed her face, in which the most rigid censor might have desired only a little less rouge, and the most demanding sculptor only a little more fineness in the nose.

Buckingham remained dazzled for an instant. Anne d’Autriche had never seemed so beautiful to him in the midst of balls, feasts, and carrousels as she seemed to him at this moment, dressed in a simple gown of white satin and accompanied by Doña Estefania, the only one of her Spanish women who had not been driven out by the king’s jealousy and the cardinal’s persecutions.

Anne d’Autriche took two steps forward; Buckingham threw himself on his knees and, before the queen could stop him, kissed the hem of her gown.

“Duke, you already know that it was not I who wrote to you.”

“Oh, yes, Madame, yes, Your Majesty!” cried the duke. “I know I was a fool, a madman, to believe that snow could become animate, that marble could become warm; but, what do you want, when one loves, one easily believes in love; besides, the journey has not been a total loss for me, since I am seeing you.”

“Yes,” Anne replied, “but you know why and how I am seeing you, Milord. I am seeing you out of pity for you; I am seeing you because, insensitive to all my difficulties, you have stubbornly remained in a city where,