Love had been the
main relaxation of his otherwise strenuous life, and neither the
advancing years--he was fifty-six at this date--nor the
recriminations of Maria de' Medici, his long-suffering Florentine
wife, sufficed to curb his zest.
Possibly there may have been a husband more unfaithful than King
Henry; probably there was not. His gallantries were outrageous,
his taste in women catholic, and his illegitimate progeny
outnumbered that of his grandson, the English sultan Charles II.
He differs, however, from the latter in that he was not quite as
Oriental in the manner of his self-indulgence. Charles, by
comparison, was a mere dullard who turned Whitehall into a
seraglio. Henry preferred the romantic manner, the high
adventure, and knew how to be gallant in two senses.
This gallantry of his is not, perhaps, seen to best advantage in
the affair of Charlotte de Montmorency To begin with he was, as I
have said, in his fifty-sixth year, an age at which it is
difficult, without being ridiculous, to unbridle a passion for a
girl of twenty. Unfortunately for him, Charlotte does not appear
to have found him so. On the contrary, her lovely, empty head was
so turned by the flattery of his addresses, that she came to
reciprocate the passion she inspired.
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