The great thing about Henri Quatre, from the point of view of a medical
essayist, is that no person of an anti-syphilitic fury will expect him
to be classed as an awful warning of the devastations of that disease.
Poor Henri died of good honest assassination, the product of an even
worse disease than syphilis—sectarian intolerance. A disease which could
cause the awful wars of Henri’s own life, and a few years later the
most dreadful of all wars—the Thirty Years’—need not fear to be classed
alongside even the most disreputable and destructive of human disorders.
And the fact that nobody in these terrible wars ever had the least idea
why people were killing each other only makes the marvel of sectarian
intolerance even more amazing than it is. Of course, there is no such
thing as _religious_ intolerance. Religion should make war impossible,
and should inculcate tolerance for other people’s opinions. Did the
good-natured and kindly gods of old Greece ever breed a religious war?
Did anybody ever go swashbuckling in helmet and armour for Zeus or
Aphrodite? Unless perhaps Aphrodite to him meant some individual woman
who had been raped from her home, such as Helen of Troy; and Helen
probably meant some vague abstraction of a Greek woman as opposed to a
barbarian, if she did not symbolise Greek trade through the Hellespont,
obstructed by Trojan robber bands. The Marxian materialist view of
history grows rather attractive when it is applied to people who have
been dead three thousand years.
Quite apart from the murderous sectarian squabbles, which have been
dignified by the name of religious wars, the life of Henri Quatre, very
properly classed as one of the heroes of France, is extraordinarily
interesting to a doctor. But in many ways the most interesting thing
about him was his relations with women. Henri may have had some
conscience about religion—though I doubt it—but, like our own Charles
II, he had absolutely no conscience about women. To him, whether he was
married or not, any pretty girl was fair game; and those who care to
read pornography can find plenty of it in the record of his life. The
seventeenth century was a period of bitter sectarian differences, and
it was a time when the divine right of kings to possess pretty girls
was elevated almost to an article of faith. Thus we had the marvellous
spectacles of King Henri IV and King Charles II, of whom the one became
a national hero, the other a byword for flippancy and falsehood. I am
not going to be led into any temptation to find the cause of the one
phenomenon in the other—to say that if it had not been a period of such
bitter sectarianism the virtue of girls might have been more sacred to
kings, because there have been good kings and bad kings at all times;
girls have been virtuous or wanton, whatever their religion; and the
seventeenth century was not the only century in history. The sixteenth
and eighteenth could show instances of moral depravity quite as bad as
that of either Henri Quatre or Charles Stuart. Let us see what a doctor
may be able to say about Henri Quatre.
When he was about nineteen he married Marguerite de Valois, the third of
that name, who has achieved fame under the popular name of Reine Margot.
She was sister to King Henri III of France; our Henri was at that time
only king of Navarre; his little kingdom lay in the south of France,
near the borders of Spain. His father had been Anthony of Bourbon; his
mother Joan of Albret. Joan had agreed to the marriage with a very heavy
heart: she feared the bright eyes of the Catholic enchantress who was
to bewitch her own beloved son. She herself was a Huguenot, who looked
upon Marguerite as sent directly from the devil. If Marguerite had really
been sent by Satan to the inferno of Parisian wickedness she needed no
great ensnaring; for, when she married the good Henri of Navarre, simple
young country bumpkin that he was, she is said to have already had an
affair with the Duke of Guise, and her reputation for virtue would not
have passed any great test. She was pretty, and what was more potent,
she had a peculiar charm of manner that enabled her to capture all but
the most resistant of men. Many of us remember how Marguerite, in the
“Huguenots” of Meyerbeer, dances along the stage singing to her lute and
plangent orchestral pizzicati “The fair land of Touraine.” Although this,
according to Wagner, is very inartistic, still, it is very charming, and
has no doubt left Marguerite for us moderns with a character that is
more beautiful than it really was. She could no more resist enchanting a
man than Henri could resist trying to possess a good-looking girl: the
bonds of matrimony sat very lightly upon both. There was no love in the
marriage, which was, almost more cynically than most royal marriages,
simply an affair of State. Catherine de Medici, Marguerite’s mother,
wished to convert Henri to the Catholic faith, and at the same time to
make him an enemy of Spain, which, under Don John of Austria, had just
won the earth-shaking victory of Lepanto.
But Marguerite could do something else besides make love: she could
write. At a time when every one else was striving to be distinguished in
style Marguerite wrote as simply and clearly as if she were speaking;
and her _Memories_ are therefore still delightful to read. Just after
her marriage the massacre of St. Bartholomew broke out. Let the royal
lady tell how it affected herself. “An hour later, while I was fast
asleep, someone came beating at my door with hands and feet, and shouting
Navarre, Navarre! My nurse, thinking it was my husband, ran to open
the door. It was a gentleman, wounded by a sword-thrust in the elbow,
and his arm cut by a halberd, who rushed into my room pursued by four
archers. Seeking safety he threw himself on my bed. Feeling this man
clutching me I threw myself into the open space between the bed and the
wall, where, he still grasping me, we both rolled over, both screaming
and both equally frightened. Fortunately the Captain of my Guards, M.
de Nancay, came by, and seeing me in such a plight could not help
laughing, but drove the archers out of the room, and gave me the life of
the poor gentleman, who was still clinging to me, and whom I caused to
be tended in my dressing-room till he was quite cured. While I changed
my nightdress,”—Marguerite was lucky to be wearing one in 1572—“for he
had covered me with his blood, M. de Nancay told me what had happened,
and assured me that my husband was in the king’s room and was quite
safe. Making me throw on a dressing-gown, he led me to the room of my
sister, Madame de Lorraine, which I reached more dead than alive; just
as I was going into the anteroom a gentleman, trying to escape from the
archers who were pursuing him, fell dead three paces from me. I too fell
half-fainting into the arms of M. de Nancay, and felt as if the same blow
had pierced us both.”
Dumas describes this incident in _Marguerite de Valois_; but his
description is no more vivid than Marguerite’s. The temptation to make
the poor fugitive the hero of his book was too great, and he turned
the ill-fated De la Mole into Marguerite’s unwilling bedfellow on that
night of weeping. I dare say that Marguerite was not sorry to be able to
save the poor man’s life, even though Dumas makes her behave far from
generously to his hero later. If I remember rightly she has him tortured
by the “boot.”
Queen Joan, her mother-in-law, describes her as being very pretty, but
one could not see her face for the paint; she was rather too stout,
and was tightly laced. Afterwards, when she had abandoned all sense of
decency, she became enormously fat, and could hardly get through an
ordinary door. Her intelligence and great fondness for reading probably
did not make Henri love her any better, because he could never finish
a serious book. She said about her brother Henri III that if all the
treachery in the world should perish Henri III had enough to restock it;
so it is clear that brother and sister did not really love one another;
and probably Marguerite could not resist the temptation to make a
scathing epigram.
But Joan need not have been so perturbed over her son falling into the
hands of the satanic Marguerite, for, if all tales were true, she was
no great saint herself. Once, when Henri III was in a particularly bad
temper, he went to Marguerite in church and called her all manner of
abominable names, so that she turned and ran weeping out of the church.
Later he went up to Henri Quatre and half-apologised for his rudeness,
explaining it because of some unfortunate incidents that had been
rumoured about Queen Joan’s own virtue. Henri laughed, and afterwards
said, “What a nice fellow he must be! He thinks by saying that I am a
bastard to make up for calling my wife a prostitute!” That was really
much the sort of thing that our own beloved Charles II might have said;
and it shows Henri Quatre as a maker of epigrams with just sufficient
truth in them to hurt. And all done with a kindly smile, too.
When the civil war broke out Henri of Navarre took the lead with
furious energy on the Protestant side; and it was then that he won his
reputation for soldiering and for romance. The white plume of Navarre
has been an oriflamme for many a novelist ever since. And it was more
than romance, though treated romantically by Macaulay in his _Battle
of Ivry_. Henry had bound upon his head a great plume of white peacock
feathers just before the battle. “Should the standards fall,” he cried,
“rally round the white plume of Navarre. I promise you that it shall
be found in the thickest of the fighting.” He made good his boast, for
he charged the Catholics two horses’ lengths ahead of his followers,
and fought furiously until his sword was beaten out of shape and his
right arm swelled with over-exertion—I suppose the lymphatics of the arm
became somehow obstructed, but I confess I do not quite understand the
pathological condition; still, the incident made a great impression upon
his soldiers and gave Henri of Navarre a name for immense courage and
enterprise. As a result of many hours’ fierce fighting the Protestants
swept the field, partly because the Swiss mercenaries, finding that
the League had not paid their wages, surrendered incontinently. “Pas
d’argent—pas de Suisse,” was their excellent motto, which the League
should have remembered. If Henri had swept on to Paris the opinion is
that he might have entered it with very little trouble. But he had
no money, he had fired away all his ammunition, and the roads were
made impassable by recent rains; moreover, even if Paris had opened
her gates to him the Pope would never have ceased his hostility to a
Protestant king of France; and once more the old spectre of civil war,
interminable, bloodthirsty, and dreadful, would have arisen. And, after
all, the majority of Frenchmen were Catholic; and the mighty power of
Spain waited just over the Pyrenees to help the Pope if indeterminate
civil war should occur. Paris lay, weakly defended, ready for assault;
but it would have been a terrible crime for Henri to give the word, and
to subject his capital to a worse than St. Bartholomew. So he agreed to
“receive instruction,” saying before he did so that his religion was that
of all brave men. Paris, strictly invested, suffered the worst horrors of
famine. Soldiers killed and ate stray children, and a woman even salted
down and ate her own babies who had died of starvation. It is said that
the poor creature went “melancholy” from this Thyestian feast, and who
can wonder? The great Alexander Farnese, Prince of Parma, was arriving
from the Netherlands with a relieving army of Spaniards; he outmanœuvred
Henri, and opened navigation to the beleaguered city. Henri could neither
pay his men nor would he permit them to pay themselves by the sack of the
city, so naturally they went home. Henri and a few faithful friends and
horse soldiers retired to watch and hope. Thus was fulfilled the prophecy
of his great, though somewhat thrifty, ally, Elizabeth of England, that
“if God shall, by His merciful grace, grant you victory, I swear to you
that it will be more than your carelessness deserves.” Kipling, in an
unforgettable phrase, has told us all about the “female of the species”;
and in many ways, Elizabeth was the female of the species to which Henri
Quatre belonged. The daughter of Henry VIII would have had no mercy if
her own ends had been at stake. And yet, I don’t know. Tilly a few years
afterwards showed at Magdeburg the horrors that could be perpetrated by
religious enthusiasts; and one hates to think that Elizabeth’s famous
patriotism could ever have allowed her to sacrifice London for a point
of belief. Henri Quatre had not only allowed friends in Paris to be fed
while he was supposed to be investing it savagely, but he had allowed it
to slip through his fingers when he might have captured it, all through
a tender-heartedness that would spare its citizens the horrors of a
Magdeburgian sack. It is no wonder that with all his faults he is one
of the heroes of France. Then Parma, finding that the Parisians hated
Spanish pride more than they hated French Protestants, went away with his
invincible army; and as soon as his back was turned Henri resumed the
siege. Parma had proved, if nothing more, that he was a better strategist
than Henri Quatre; but Paris returned to the old misery of starvation and
disease, a misery that it has so often braved nobly.
And now began Henri’s more serious troubles with women. For a long time
he had an affair with one Madame de Grasmont, whom he called Corisande.
To her he wrote the most passionate of letters. Anybody would think to
read them that he really loved her; but even as he besieged Paris he
had fallen in love with the abbesses of Poissy and Montmartre, whose
profession should have taught them wisdom if not virtue. Now came a
more serious affair. In 1590 he met a Gabrielle d’Estrees, with whom he
fell violently in love while he was “carrying on” with the other three
ladies. She already had a beautiful lover; but that did not matter to
Henri Quatre. Probably it only caused him to admire her the more. He
slipped through detachments of the enemy dressed as a woodcutter with a
bundle of straw on his head to visit her: a nice romantic and undignified
action for a king; but we shall see later, as he grew older, how he could
stoop even lower. For the present the problem was how to gain possession
of Gabrielle, get rid of Corisande, and set up a nominal possessor who
should not be a rival in Gabrielle’s heart. He got her father to marry
Gabrielle to a M. de Liancourt, an aged widower with eleven children,
while Henri IV enjoyed the _droits de seigneur_. Corisande, growing old,
dropped out of the picture.
Then came a fierce struggle for Rouen, with Parma hovering ready to give
battle. Again he showed his superiority to Henri Quatre as a strategist
by transporting his army secretly across the Seine and escaping Henri’s
threatened attack. Henri had a much larger army than Parma’s, and it
was only Parma’s extraordinary skill that saved him from destruction.
But now came the end of the long war; for Parma died and Henri turned
Catholic. “Paris is well worth a Mass!” as he did not say. We have
always been taught to consider this as an act of shameless cynicism; but
there was a great deal to be said in Henri’s favour: certainly from the
point of view of the twentieth century his action was the only thing
that could have brought peace to his country. Though Parma was dead,
Spain was still powerful and vengeful; the Catholic priests called Henri
heretic, relapsed miscreant, devil and bastard, whom the soldiers knew
to be a kind and generous friend, always smiling and ready to help.
Gabrielle—“charmante Gabrielle,” who has given her name to a song that
Henri wrote in her honour—urged him to turn Catholic, that the Pope might
perhaps divorce Marguerite and let him marry Gabrielle. So Henri yielded,
threw his scruples to the winds, and embraced the Old Religion; though
his embrace was probably not so ardent as those which he gave to the
abbesses, who more corporeally represented the faith to which he yielded.
An amusing sidelight on his character is thrown by his message to Queen
Elizabeth by the mouth of her supposed lover Essex, whom she had been
rating soundly because he had lost too many Englishmen in Henri’s wars.
The irate Virgin was so flattered by Henri’s praise of her beauty and
charm that it needed all her caution and frugality to keep England
from plunging single-handed into yet another great war with Spain on
his behalf. Happily for us she had sense enough to keep out of it; and
before her help became necessary Henri had gone to Mass. When Henri fell
so shamelessly in love with Gabrielle he was thirty-five years of age,
and perhaps the ordinary neurasthenia of middle age began to trouble
him—that cause of so much marital unhappiness and so many divorces.
But, if any one woman could be said to have captured his heart, it was
undoubtedly Gabrielle. I once read an account of her written by a lady,
possibly unmarried. Anyhow, none would have guessed from this extremely
proper description that she was Henri’s official mistress; the good
lady seems never to have heard of a man being anything but a woman’s
husband. Gabrielle was rather ample of figure—Henri seems to have liked
his women fat—and had deep blue eyes and golden hair. Her face was kind
and smiling, her manner gentle; before she fell in love with Henri her
morals had been, to say the least, unconventional; after she admitted
the king to her friendship she continued her relations with the lover
who had innocently introduced her to this more enterprising king. She
was extravagant, and the king loaded her with jewels at a time when he
said he was penniless; created her Marchioness of Monceaux and Duchess of
Beaufort. He was as faithful to her as it was possible for him to be to
any woman, which is not saying very much. At any rate his _amours_ were
henceforth conducted with a certain amount of decency and discretion.
When she died the only book found in her possession was her “book of
hours.” Except for her easy morals it would be impossible to find a
greater contrast than that between her and Marguerite, who could wrap
herself in learned books, play the lute, and write like a novelist. It
would seem impossible for even “Aunt Tabitha” of a lady’s newspaper to
give to Marguerite de Valois any hints on the art of managing a husband;
but it is clear that she did not go the right way about it with Henri
of Navarre; and Gabrielle d’Estrees was evidently much more to his
taste, for he remained approximately, though not bigotedly, faithful to
her till she died. In justice to Marguerite it is only fair to say that
she never liked him; she was forced by mother and brother into marrying
him; and probably even a sixteenth-century princess had her preferences.
The ultimate result was that Gabrielle became a sort of idol among the
people, who overlooked her unusual position for the sake of her wide-set
blue eyes and kind smile; and a few years after she died she was already
a legend. To this day she and Henri Quatre are greeted with a kindly
smile among the French when one mentions them, and “charmante Gabrielle”
is still a well-known song.
As the years rolled by she bore him several children, and more and more
took the position of his wife. He became still more infatuated with her;
and she, for her part, abandoned the life of dissipation which is said to
have distinguished her youth. Henri wanted to marry her; she must have
had great powers of fascination to make him so faithful after so many
years. The idea was to procure a divorce from Marguerite and elevate his
mistress to the throne. But just before the proposed marriage Gabrielle
went to Paris and stayed at the house of an Italian named Zamet. On
April 7th, 1599, she became very ill, and was artificially delivered
of a dead child on the 9th. She fell into violent convulsions; on the
10th she became unconscious, and that evening she died. Of course Sully,
who did not like her—for even Gabrielle had her enemies—hinted that she
was poisoned—such was the reputation of the Italians in Paris at that
time—and Sully’s ill-natured hint has evidently influenced historians to
this day, for the good lady whom I quoted above repeats it as at least
probable. But is it not much more probable that she died of puerperal
eclampsia? She was middle-aged; she had had several children; she was
far from slight in figure. At the Royal Hospital for Women in Sydney we
find that most of these women who die nowadays from eclampsia are very
much like Gabrielle in age, figure, and the number of their children.
Of course it is impossible to say definitely; but I should be very much
surprised to find that Gabrielle’s kidneys were absolutely healthy
during that last year of her life. And it is quite possible that in
that last confinement Gabrielle in this way paid the penalty for her
dissipation in early youth. It is at least more likely that she should
die from a perfectly well-known and fatal disease such as eclampsia
than that anybody should try to poison a woman so generally popular,
though she had enemies who were both jealous of her and disliked the
idea of a royal mistress becoming Queen of France. Kidney trouble is
often caused by drink, and people at the Court of France—indeed, all
over Europe—generally used to drink too much in those days. After all,
it is only a speculation that could easily explain the sudden death of
an apparently perfectly healthy woman just as the moment was approaching
when she would achieve her ambition.
Henri was broken-hearted; he swore that never more could he see happiness
again. Yet three months later he was paying court to a very different
sort of woman from Gabrielle—to Henriette d’Entragues, a slim girl of
eighteen with a bitter tongue. He was then about fifty years of age, and
had led a very anxious and troubled life. He had been a hard rider, a
famous cavalryman. At the end of a few weeks of “courtship” he induced
Henriette to accept a document in which he promised to marry her if she
could bear him a living son in the course of a year. Henriette agreed
to try, and joyfully took her position as the mistress and promised
wife of the King. But alas for Henriette! Six months later there came a
terrible thunderstorm that caused her to miscarry, and released Henri
of his bargain. But his ministers had already engaged him to Marie de’
Medici; and Henri probably felt that Jove’s thunderbolt had come to his
assistance. By that time Marguerite had been duly divorced by an obliging
Pope, who would no doubt do a great deal for the brand plucked from the
burning of Protestantism. In middle age Marguerite became enormously fat,
and there are many stories told about her orgies with footmen and other
tall fellows. It is said that, if they died in her service, she used to
carry their hearts about her in a bag, and that she used to wear a wig
made from their locks of yellow hair. Indeed, imagination has exhausted
itself in devising infamies for the last years of Marguerite de Valois.
It is difficult to recognise this corpulent and beraddled woman in the
gay young princess who danced to lute and pizzicati strings in the
“Huguenots.” Reine Margot indeed had a sorrowful ending, judging by the
ordinary canons of human happiness. But perhaps the stories are not true.
She is always considered an amazing example of the Valois faculty for
combining artistic sensibility with the grossest lust. Strange things are
said to have happened in history; and one must always remember her very
unhappy marriage.
Soon after fifty old age, according to Sir Humphrey Rolleston, usually
touches the average man lightly on the shoulder, and his friends begin
indelicately to “chaff” him, saying, “Oh, you’re not as good a man as
you were ten years ago”; it is then that the average man, according to
some philosophers, begins to feel happy for the first time in his life.
Proverbs have been coined about this well-known fact, on the lines of
the Greek “call no man happy till he is dead.” According to another
school of philosophy happiness only comes with the loss of the teeth.
But sometimes the aging man boasts of his prowess as if to defy time and
proverbs. Such a hero is always abnormal: either the first symptoms of
some nervous disease are beginning to show themselves, or some other less
subtle change is occurring in his body. His position is very much like
that of a lady who, after the climacteric, observes that what she thinks
to be the normal periodical discharge has returned; she does not know
that this is often the first sign of cancer of the womb, and that what
she thinks to be rejuvenescence is really often her death-warrant. Youth
never returns; the tale of years is inexorable. It is lucky for the old
man if he has some faithful friend who will guard him, and, as is said
euphemistically, “keep him out of mischief”—that is to say, keep him
from catching syphilis, which is a terrible thing in old age, or at any
age. The old man thus afflicted seems absolutely to go mad about women;
dignity, honour, decency, and all else, are forgotten.
When to ordinary senility there is added the intolerable desire that
accompanies such trouble as I have mentioned, all other considerations
are cast to the winds. After his marriage to Marie de’ Medici Henri
abandoned even the pretence of decency. Marie seems to have had to let
him go his own way. As for him, he complained that she made his life a
hell upon earth, and he attempted to assuage his wounded feelings with
every other girl who came his way. 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.
Alas, Charlotte was already engaged to a M. de Bassompierre; but this
did not daunt the conqueror of Gabrielle d’Estrees. He had dealt with
such trifles before. As he lay groaning with the gout he thought out a
brilliant scheme, which he amazingly proposed to M. de Bassompierre. He
sent for the young man, told him that he was frantically in love with
Charlotte, and asked him to give up the idea of marrying her so that the
damsel should be free to become Henri’s platonic mistress, with all her
virginal beauty untouched. And de Bassompierre actually agreed to give
up his bride. Naturally Charlotte was deeply aggrieved, and gave her
easy-going and youthful lover such a withering glance that he retired
in mortification to his own room and could not eat for three days. But
that did not mean that Henri was to possess her; for, in the easy fashion
of those days, he married her to the Prince de Condé, who was supposed
to think only of hunting and field-sports and not at all about women.
But Condé’s nature changed after marriage to a beautiful girl, as any
cynic might have expected; and he became mightily annoyed when he saw
the king aping the young man in silks and satins, and paying violent
court to his beautiful young wife; nor was Charlotte so discreet as she
might have been, for she received from him desperate love-letters and
poems, and answered them erotically and foolishly. The young husband and
the elderly lover quarrelled fiercely, and Henri lost what dignity he
still possessed. Then Condé took her away for safety to a castle near
Flanders; Henri followed, and stood by the roadside, disguised as one of
his own huntsmen, with a patch over one eye that he might have the joy
of gazing upon her for a moment. Seeing her at a window, he would bow
and kiss his hand, placing the other hand over his heart, and assuming
all the ridiculous antics of an elderly lover on the stage. The Duc de
Montmorency, her father, wished Charlotte to yield that he might gain
the favour of the king. When Condé heard this he thought he had better
take more active measures, so the young couple hastened over the border,
whither Henri could not follow them. The actual details of the next
few months are not very interesting; they simply represent the frantic
efforts of a man who was getting senile to gratify an adulterous passion.
It is said that he even threatened war with Spain for Charlotte’s bright
eyes, but this is probably not true. Henri loved his country enough to
prevent him from doing anything so wicked. But if his prostate was not
growing too large he showed all the mental symptoms of it so far as we
can tell to-day. The incident is one of the most painful in history, and
calls for all one’s sympathy with the “sorrows of a poor old man.”
Then came Ravaillac 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 fifty-five has nothing to look forward
to but the “labour and sorrow” of the Psalmist. People often wonder what
further reforms he might have effected 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. Syphilis would no doubt
account for it; but so far as I know there is no reason to suspect it. He
had done great work for France. Besides the merciful Edict of Nantes,
which gave freedom of worship to the French Protestants for generations,
he reformed her finances, organised her army, and introduced the silkworm
industry which has done so much to strengthen the people of that amazing
country. The French have long ago forgiven his sins against morality
and decency, and taken him to their hearts as one of the greatest of
Frenchmen. And now, when his wonderful personal charm has long mouldered
to dust, the evil that he did is interred with his bones: only the good
remains in the memory of mankind.
* * * * *
The best book about the troubles of old age is _The Medical Aspects of
Old Age_, by Sir Humphrey Rolleston, which, though originally written for
doctors, should be read by every man and woman in the land; for perhaps
it would induce in them a greater sympathy for the old men. “Enlarged
prostate” must be taken symbolically. The whole subject of these senile
attacks of concupiscence is still under discussion, and, just as you
spared me a too close inquiry into Elizabeth’s physical attributes, I
ask you to spare me the inquiry into those of an equally great, but far
more lovable, sovereign, Henri Quatre. The incident of Henri Quatre and
Charlotte de Montmorency seems to represent what is known as a “psychosis
of involution” occurring somewhat prematurely owing to Henri’s hard life
in the field.