Henri of Navarre, hero of romance and probably the greatest King who ever sat on the throne of France, had a heart as weak in love as it was stout in war. To his last day he was a veritable coward before the battery of bright eyes; and before Ravaillac’s dagger brought his career to a tragic end one May day in the year 1610 he had counted his mistresses to as many as the years he had lived.

But of them all, fifty-seven of them for the most part lightly coming and lightly going only one ever really reached his heart, and was within measurable distance of a seat on his throne the woman to whom he wrote in the hey-day of his passion, “Never has man loved as I love you. If any sacrifice of mine could purchase your happiness, how gladly I would make it, even to the last drop of my life’s blood.”

Gabrielle d’Estrees who thus enslaved the heart of the hero, which carried him to a throne through a hundred fights and inconceivable hardships, was cradled one day in the year 1573 in Touraine. From her mother, Francoise Babou, she inherited both beauty and frailness; for the Babou women were famous alike for their loveliness and for a virtue as facile even as that of Marie Gaudin, the pretty plaything of Francois I., who left Francois’ arms to find a husband in Philip Babou and thus to transmit her charms and frailty to Gabrielle.

Her father, Antoine, son of Jean d’Estrees, a valiant soldier under five kings, was a man of pleasure, who drank and sang his way through life, preferring Cupid to Mars and the joie de vivre to the call of duty. It is perhaps little wonder that Antoine’s wife, after bearing seven children to her husband, left him to find at least more loyalty in the Marquess of Tourel-Alegre, a lover twenty years younger than herself.

Thus it was that, deserted by her mother, and with a father too addicted to pleasure to spare a thought for his children, Gabrielle grew to beautiful girlhood under the care of an aunt now living in the family chateau in Picardy, now in the great Paris mansion, the Hotel d’Estrees; and with so little guidance from precept or example that, in later years, she and her six sisters and brothers were known as the “Seven Deadly Sins.”

In Gabrielle at least there was little that was vicious. She was an irresponsible little creature, bubbling over with mischief and gaiety, eager to snatch every flower of pleasure that caught her eyes; a dainty little fairy with big blue “wonder” eyes, golden hair, the sweetest rosebud of a mouth, ready to smile or to pout as the mood of the moment suggested, with soft round baby cheeks as delicately flushed as any rose.

Such was Gabrielle d’Estrees on the verge of young womanhood when Roger de Saint-Larry, Duc de Bellegarde, the King’s grand equerry, and one of the handsomest young men in France, first set eyes on her in the chateau of Coeuvres; and, as was inevitable, lost his heart to her at first sight. When he rode away two days later, such excellent use had he made of his opportunities, he left a very happy, if desolate maiden behind; for Gabrielle had little power to resist fascinations which had made a conquest of many of the fairest ladies at Court.

When Bellegarde returned to Mantes, where Henri was still struggling for the crown which was so soon to be his, he foolishly gave the King of Navarre such a rapturous account of the young beauty of Picardy and his conquest that Henri, already weary of the faded charms of Diane d’Audouins, his mistress, promptly left his soldiering and rode away to see the lady for himself, and to find that Bellegarde’s raptures were more than justified.

Gabrielle, however, flattered though she was by such an honour as a visit from the King of Navarre, was by no means disposed to smile on the wooing of “an ugly man, old enough to be my father.” And indeed, Henri, with all the glamour of the hero to aid him, was but a sorry rival for the handsome and courtly Bellegarde. Now nearing his fortieth year, with grizzled beard, and skin battered and lined by long years of hard campaigning, the future King of France had little to appeal to the romantic eyes of a maid who counted less than half his years; and the King in turn rode away from the Coeuvres Castle as hopelessly in love as Bellegarde, but with much less encouragement to return.

But the hero of Ivry and a hundred other battles was no man to submit to defeat in any lists; and within a few weeks Gabrielle was summoned to Mantes, where he told her in decisive words that he loved her, and that no one, Bellegarde or any other, should share her with him. “Indeed!” she exclaimed, with a defiant toss of the head, “I will be no man’s slave; I shall give my heart to whom I please, and certainly not to any man who demands it as a right.” And within an hour she was riding home fast as her horse could gallop.

Henri was thunderstruck at such defiance. He must follow her at once and bring her to reason; but, in order to do so, he must risk his life by passing through the enemy’s lines. Such an adventure, however, was after his own heart; and disguising himself as a peasant, with a bundle of faggots on his shoulder, he made his way safely to Coeuvres, where he presented himself, a pitiable spectacle of rags and poverty, to be greeted by his lady with shouts of derisive laughter. “Oh dear!” she gasped between her paroxysms of mirth, “what a fright you look! For goodness’ sake go and change your clothes.” But though the King obeyed humbly, Gabrielle shut herself in her room and declined point-blank to see him again.

Such devotion, however, expressed in such fashion, did not fail in its appeal to the romantic girl; and when, a little later, Gabrielle visited the Royalist army then besieging Chartres, it was a much more pliant Gabrielle who listened to the King’s wooing and whose eyes brightened at his stories of bravery and danger. Henri might be old and ugly, but he had at least a charm of manner, a frank, simple manliness, which made him the idol of his soldiers and in fact of every woman who once came under its spell. And to this charm even Gabrielle, the rebel, had at last to submit, until Bellegarde was forgotten, and her hero was all the world to her.

The days that followed this slow awaking were crowded with happiness for the two lovers; when Gabrielle was not by her King’s side, he was writing letters to her full of passionate tenderness. “My beautiful Love,” “My All,” “My Trueheart” such were the sweet terms he lavished on her. “I kiss you a million times. You say that you love me a thousand times more than I love you. You have lied, and you shall maintain your falsehood with the arms which you have chosen. I shall not see you for ten days, it is enough to kill me.” And again, “They call me King of France and Navarre that of your subject is much more delightful you have much more cause for fearing that I love you too much than too little. That fault pleases you, and also me, since you love it. See how I yield to your every wish.”

Such were the letters among the most beautiful ever penned by lover which the King addressed to his “Menon” in those golden days, when all the world was sunshine for him, black as the sky was still with the clouds of war. And she returned love for love; tenderness for passion. When he was lying ill at St Denis, she wrote, “I die of fear. Tell me, I implore you, how fares the bravest of the brave. Give me news, my cavalier; for you know how fatal to me is your least ill. I cannot sleep without sending you a thousand good nights; for I am the Princess Constancy, sensible to all that concerns you, and careless of all else in the world, good or bad.”

Through the period of stress and struggle that still separated Henri from the crown which for nearly twenty years was his goal, Gabrielle was ever by his side, to soothe and comfort him, to chase away the clouds of gloom which so often settled on him, to inspire him with new courage and hope, and, with her diplomacy checking his impulses, to smooth over every obstacle that the cunning of his enemies placed in his path.

And when, at last, one evening in 1594, Henri made his triumphal entry into Paris, on a grey horse, wearing a gold-embroidered grey habit, his face proud and smiling, saluting with his plume-crowned hat the cheering crowds, Gabrielle had the place of honour in front of him, “in a gorgeous litter, so bedecked with pearls and gems that she paled the light of the escorting torches.”

This was, indeed, a proud hour for the lovers which saw Henri acclaimed at “long last” King of France, and his loyal lady-love Queen in all but name. The years of struggle and hardship were over years in which Henri of Navarre had braved and escaped a hundred deaths; and in which he had been reduced to such pitiable straits that he had often not known where his next meal was to come from or where to find a shirt to put on his back.

Gabrielle was now Marquise de Monceaux, a title to which her Royal lover later added that of Duchesse de Beaufort. Her son, Cesar, was known as “Monsieur,” the title that would have been his if he had been heir to the French throne. All that now remained to fill the cup of her ambition and her happiness was that she should become the legal wife of the King she loved so well; and of this the prospect seemed more than fair.

Charming stories are told of the idyllic family life of the new King; how his greatest pleasure was to “play at soldiers” with his children, to join in their nursery romps, or to take them, like some bourgeois father, to the Saint Germain fair, and return loaded with toys and boxes of sweetmeats, to spend delightful homely evenings with the woman he adored.

But it was not all sunshine for the lovers. Paris was in the throes of famine and plague and flood. Poverty and discontent stalked through her streets, and there were scowling and envious eyes to greet the King and his lady when they rode laughing by; or when, as on one occasion we read of, they returned from a hunting excursion, riding side by side, “she sitting astride dressed all in green” and holding the King’s hand.

Nor within the palace walls was it all a bed of roses for Gabrielle; for she had her enemies there; and chief among them the powerful Duc de Sully, her most formidable rival in the King’s affection. Sully was not only Henri’s favourite minister; he was the Jonathan to his David, the man who had shared a hundred dangers by his side, and by his devotion and affection had found a firm lodging in his heart.

Between the minister and the mistress, each consumed with jealousy of the other, Henri had many a bad hour; and the climax came when de Sully refused to pass the extravagant charges for the baptism of the Marquise’s second son, Alexander. Gabrielle was indignant and appealed angrily and tearfully to the King, who supported his minister. “I have loved you,” he said at last, roused to wrath, “because I thought you gentle and sweet and yielding; now that I have raised you to high position, I find you exacting and domineering. Know this, I could better spare a dozen mistresses like you than one minister so devoted to me as Sully.”

At these harsh words, Gabrielle burst into tears. “If I had a dagger,” she exclaimed, “I would plunge it into my heart, and then you would find your image there.” And when Henri rushed from the room, she ran after him, flung herself at his feet, and with heart-breaking sobs, begged for forgiveness and a kind word. Such troubles as these, however, were but as the clouds that come and go in a summer sky. Gabrielle’s sun was now nearing its zenith; Henri had long intended to make her his wife at the altar; proceedings for divorce from his wife, Marguerite de Valois, were running smoothly; and now the crowning day in the two lives thus romantically linked was at hand.

In the month of April, 1599, Gabrielle and Henri were spending the last ante-nuptial days together at Fontainebleau; the wedding was fixed for the first Sunday after Easter, and Gabrielle was ideally happy among her wedding finery and the costly presents that had been showered on her from all parts of France from the ring Henri had worn at his Coronation and which he was to place on her finger at the altar, to a statue of the King in gold from Lyons, and a “giant piece of amber in a silver casket from Bordeaux.”

Her wedding-dress was a gorgeous robe of Spanish velvet, rich in embroideries of gold and silver; the suite of rooms which was to be hers as Queen was already ready, with its splendours of crimson and gold furnishing. The greatest ladies in France were now proud to act as her tire-women; and princes and ambassadors flocked to Fontainebleau to pay her homage.

The last days of Holy Week it had been arranged that she should spend in devotion at Paris, and Henri was her escort the greater part of the way. When they parted on the banks of the Seine they wept in each other’s arms, while Gabrielle, full of nameless forebodings, clung to her lover and begged him to take her back to Fontainebleau. But with a final embrace he tore himself away; and with streaming eyes Gabrielle continued her journey, full of fears as to its issue; for had not a seer of Piedmont told her that the marriage would never take place; and other diviners, whom she had consulted, warned her that she would die young, and never call Henri husband?

Two days later Gabrielle heard Mass at the Church of St Germain l’Auxerrois; and on returning to the Deanery, her aunt’s home, became seriously ill. She grew rapidly worse; her sufferings were terrible to witness; and on Good Friday she was delivered of a dead child. To quote an eye-witness, “She lingered until six o’clock in very great pain, the like of which doctors and surgeons had never seen before. In her agony she tore her face, and injured herself in other parts of her body.” Before dawn broke on the following day she drew her last breath.

When news of her illness reached the King, he flew to her swift as his horse could carry him, only to meet couriers on his way who told him that Madame was already dead; and to find, when at last he reached St Germain l’Auxerrois, the door of the room in which she lay barred against him. He could not take her living once more into his arms; he was not allowed to see her dead.

Henri was as a man who is mad with grief; he was inconsolable.. None dared even to approach him with words of pity and comfort. For eight days he shut himself in a black-draped room, himself clothed in black; and he wrote to his sister, “The root of my love is dead; there will be no Spring for me any more.” Three months later he was making love to Gabrielle’s successor, Henriette d’Entragues!

Thus perished in tragedy Gabrielle d’Estrees, the creature of sunshine, who won the bravest heart in Europe, and carried her conquest to the very foot of a throne.