Charlotte Marguerite de Montmorency

There were many such who yielded to the king while they mocked at the elderly man with their younger lovers.

Then in 1609 he met Charlotte de Montmorency, a charming and beautiful maiden of fifteen.

He saw her while she was rehearsing for a mask dressed up as a nymph of Diana.

He was passionately arrested by her beauty, but soon afterwards was laid up with an attack of gout.

Then came Ravier and his dagger to end Henri's misery and probably to those who know the inevitable end of a man suffering possibly from enlarged prostate without modern surgery, Providence was kind to Henri in sparing him years of real misery and pain.

Assassination is at least a merciful death to a man who at 55 has nothing to look forward to but the labor and sorrow of the psalmist.

People often wonder what further reforms he might have affected in France, but it is the common experience that a man does not live very long after such an incident as that with Charlotte de Montmorency.

We cannot even guess at the cause of this degeneration in Henri and Marguerite.