She began to reign when Henri was king, and no doubt he was one of
her most ardent admirers. Don't look frightened! She was always a model of
virtue. Mademoiselle Scudery has devoted pages to painting her perfections
under an Oriental alias. She sang, she danced, she talked divinely. She did
everything better than everybody else. Priests and Bishops praised her. And
after changes and losses and troubles, she died far from Paris, a spinster,
nearly sixty years old. It was a paltry finish to a life that began in a
blaze of glory."
CHAPTER VIII.
SUPERIOR TO FASHION.
At Oxford Angela was so happy as to be presented to Catharine of Braganza,
a little dark woman, whose attire still bore some traces of its original
Portuguese heaviness; such a dress--clumsy, ugly, infinitely rich and
expensive--as one sees in old portraits of Spanish and Netherlandish
matrons, in which every elaborate detail of the costly fabric seems to have
been devised in the research of ugliness. She saw the King also; met him
casually--she walking with her brother-in-law, while Lady Fareham and her
friends ran from shop to shop in the High Street--in Magdalen College
grounds, a group of beauties and a family of spaniels fawning upon him as
he sauntered slowly, or stopped to feed the swans that swam close by
the bank, keeping pace with him, and stretching long necks in greedy
solicitation.
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