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HENRIETTA MARIA OF FRANCE. 465 ble anxieties regarding the safety of her husband, but she was herself in the midst of the terrors of civil war and reduced to the most complete destitution. The war of the Fronde was raging in and around Paris, and on the~eventful 6th of Janu- ary, when the count escaped to St. Germain-en-Laye, and her sister-in-law, the queen regent, was thence attacking the city, Henrietta was also beleaguered in the Louvre by the Fronde faction and reduced to absolute faniine. There Cardinal Retz, the head of that faction, found her — her last loaf eaten, her last fagot consumed, and without money to purchase further fire or food. The snow was falling fast and her youngest child, four years old, was lying in bed as the only means of warmth. At that moment she was writing an agonized letter to the French ambassador in London, imploring him to obtain leave for -her to join her husband, as she had received the news that he was about to be brought to trial for his life. A. more absolute picture of human misery is not to be conceived. It was pecuniarily relieved by a grant from the parliament of Paris of 20,000 livres. Not many days after Charles' murder the unfortunate Hen- rietta was told a sham story, that the king had been carried from his prison to the scaffold with a design to cut off his head, but that the populace opposed it ; yet, notwithstanding this compassionate ruse, devised by Lord Jermyn, the shock was so great as to cause her to confess, afterward, her aston- ishment that she ever survived such a misfortune. Personal calamity she had endured even in the extreme of corporeal weakness ; she had been indeed steeped in poverty to the very lips, and, Like the Pontic monarch of old days, She fed on poisons ; but now her heart had lost its source of earthly happiness and the external mourning which she wore ever afterwards, suffi- cient proof of the absurdity of the popular report of her sub- sequent marriage with Lord Jermyn, was a sincere type of that fixed sadness of thought which time could not remove, if it enabled her to dissemble. She survived, the relict of him with whom in life she had mingled each aspiration of hope — each desponding gloom of care ; and now the unseen image of "her king, her husband and her friend" was to fill the void within her breast, even as in his last hour the significant word,