Madame de Sauve sighed; then she went and sat down before her toilet-table. Henry took a chair, pulled it along toward the one that served as his mistress's seat, and setting one knee on it while he leaned on the back of the other, he said:
"Come, my good little Charlotte, let me see you make yourself beautiful, and beautiful for me whatever you said. Heavens! What things! What scent-bottles, what powders, what phials, what perfumery boxes!"
"It seems a good deal," said Charlotte, with a sigh, "and yet it is too little, since with it all I have not as yet found the means of reigning exclusively over your majesty's heart."
"There!" exclaimed Henry; "let us not fall back on politics! What is that little fine delicate brush? Should it not be for painting the eyebrows of my Olympian Jupiter?"
"Yes, sire," replied Madame de Sauve, "and you have guessed at the first shot!"
"And that pretty little ivory rake?"
"’Tis for parting the hair!"
"And that charming little silver box with a chased cover?"
"Oh, that is something Réné sent, sire; ’tis the famous opiate which he has been promising me so long—to make still sweeter the lips which your majesty has been good enough sometimes to find rather sweet."
And Henry, as if to test what the charming woman said, touched his lips to the ones which she was looking at so attentively in the mirror. Now that they were returning to the field of coquetry, the cloud began to lift from the baroness's brow. She took up the box which had thus been explained, and was just going to show Henry how the vermilion salve was used, when a sharp rap at the antechamber door startled the two lovers.