Note 286 — Chapter IX

As the throng of nobles increased, and crowded about the King so as considerably to inconvenience him, he was lifted upon a billiard-table, from which extraordinary eminence he received their compliments and congratulations upon the murder to which he had been accessory only an hour before; and which the First President of the Parliament of Paris (whose extreme haste to pay his court to his new master was such that, being unable immediately to procure a carriage, he proceeded to the Louvre on foot) designated his happy deliverance.[286] Nothing, in short, but plumed hats sweeping the marble floor, flexile forms bending to the earth, and lips wreathed in smiles, was to be seen in the kingly hall in which Henri IV had loved to discuss grave topics with his sturdy minister, the Duc de Sully, and which Marie de Medicis, in her day of pride and power, had enriched with the glorious productions of her immortal protégé, Rubens the painter-prince, as she was wont to call him. None cared to remember at that moment that Henry the Great was in his grave, and that his royal widow had been sacrificed to the insatiable ambition and the quenchless hate of a low-born minion.