Her love of dress had been as great as might have been expected of a woman of her beauty, her rank, and, above all, her nationality. Once in her early married life she expressed great pleasure in a magnificent gown studded with jewels which she was wearing. Her confessor, the stern Bérulle, who was present, reproved her somewhat sharply for her vanity and frivolity. "Ah, mon père, do not be angry with me," pleaded the young Queen, half laughing and half penitent. "I am young now, but when I am forty I will change all this, and become quite good and serious." Her light words were prophetic, for she was in her fortieth year when she became a widow.
Contemporary prints show of what fashion was her widow's dress. It was of some black stuff made quite plainly, except that the bodice was shaped to a point in front, and it was almost high at the neck; the only relief was a white linen collar, falling down over the shoulders, and matching the cuffs, which turned back over the wide sleeves. From the head fell a long, heavy black veil.
This sorrowful garb was the outward expression of a grief which, like most deep grief, craved the consolation of quiet and retirement. And where, in the Paris of that day, could quiet be found, except within the protecting walls of a religious house?
Henrietta, since her return to Paris in 1644, had frequented the Carmelite convent which her childhood loved, and in her first sorrow she would gladly have forsaken the world altogether, and remained there among the nuns;[402] but her duties were incompatible with this step. Her young sons required her help to restore their shattered fortunes, and, above all, her youngest daughter needed a mother's care; after her husband's death her worldly occupations increased rather than diminished, and it was these occupations which cost her the loss of her calm retreat among the Carmelite nuns.
The daughters of S. Teresa are vowed to an austere separation from all things worldly, and their rule could not brook the constant coming and going, the noise and the disturbance which waited upon a Queen who was also a politician. They were obliged to request the Queen of England to forgo her visits, and she, however sorrowfully, recognized the justice of their desire and withdrew, to seek another retirement more suited to the conditions of her case.
A hasty glance at a map of seventeenth-century Paris will show the great number of religious houses which then existed, and it might be surmised that to make a choice among them would be no easy matter; but Henrietta's circumstances were peculiar, and she had little difficulty in selecting the one most fitted to them.
HENRIETTA MARIA
FROM AN ENGRAVING
Some forty years earlier the wise and gentle spirit of S. Francis de Sales had conceived the idea of a religious foundation in which women, delicately nurtured and well educated, might live in greater freedom of spirit and less austerity of body than in the older Orders. He was fortunate enough to find a woman[403] capable of translating his ideas into fact, and the Order of the Visitation flourished exceedingly, and by the middle of the seventeenth century had spread all over France.
Paris was naturally one of the first places to which the new Order came. The community, which boasted that it had once been ruled over by Mother Chantal herself, after some wanderings finally settled down in the Rue S. Antoine, within a stone's-throw of the grim fortress of the Bastille. Though the tide of fashion had set definitely westward since the final abandonment of the Place Royal by Louis XIII, the position was still a good one. Next door was the fine Hôtel de Mayence, which still stands as a witness of departed glories, but of the convent nothing remains except the church, which, though but small, was considered in the seventeenth century "one of the neatest in all Paris."[404] Madame de Motteville was the means of introducing this convent to Henrietta's notice. Her own young sister, to whom she was tenderly attached, had lately entered the house as a novice, greatly against her wishes; but in her visits to the girl she had been so won by the piety and kindness of the nuns that she begged the Queen of England to make their acquaintance.