Mary de' Medici was beautiful in 1592, when she had first been talked about, and her portrait at that time had charmed the king; but in 1600 she was twenty-seven, tall, fat, with round, staring eyes and a forbidding air, and ill dressed.

She knew hardly a word of French; and Henriette d'Entraigues, whom the king had made Marquise do Verneuil, could not help exclaiming when she saw her, "So that is the fat bankeress from Florence!" Henry IV.

seemed to have attained in his public and in his domestic life the pinnacle of earthly fortune and ambition.

He was, at one and the same time, Catholic king and the head of the Protestant polity in Europe, accepted by the Catholics as the best, the only possible, king for them in France.

He was at peace with all Europe, except one petty prince, the Duke of Savoy, Charles Emmanuel I., from whom he demanded back the marquisate of Saluzzo, or a territorial compensation in France itself on the French side of the Alps.