THE KING’S LOVE AFFAIRS

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It is all very fine to talk about the bearing of penalties,
but it is not easy to discover the burden that the King
carried—for himself or anybody else; and his memory was
strewn with so many ruins that they only served to make
it picturesque. The Queen was not alone in her experience
of him. Sooner or later he tired of wife and mistress alike.
Even before Claude died, Madame de Chateaubriand began
to see symptoms of a change in him and recognised the
advent of a rival. She writes a letter in vehement dispraise
of fair complexions, which shows the way the wind blew.
“Blanche couleur,” she says, “est bientot effacee.... Blanche
couleur n’est pas longtemps nette” (clear). She reproaches
him in rhyme—but she is none the less bitter for that.
She knew too well that her only chance was to amuse him
(“Celle qui est noire” she calls herself); and when that
fails, she breaks down and becomes pathetic. She writes
her own epitaph and begs him, if he ever loved her, to
look at it as he passes by. It must have been a deep
sorrow which made a King’s mistress natural, and there is
the tragic force of sincerity in her cry :
Une femme gisant en cette fosse obscure
Mourut par trop aimer d’amour grande et naive.
Francis ran no risk of such a death, and he found little
difficulty in parting with his old love. The new one was
ready—the golden-haired Mademoiselle d’Heilly de Pisseleu
(afterwards Duchesse d’Etampes), deliberately chosen for him
by his mother. The King relieved what feelings he had
by writing a poem on the complication of caring for too
many people at once. “I am constrained to love three
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