Queen Blanche, having got her son married, was jealous of the wife and of the happiness she had conferred upon her; jealous as mother and as queen, a rival for affection and for empire.

Blanche was a pure Christian girl.

When the ushers saw the queen-mother coming into the chamber of the king her son, they knocked upon the door with their staves, and the king came running into his chamber, so that his mother might find him there; and so, in turn, did the ushers of Queen Marguerite's chamber when Queen Blanche came thither, so that she might find Queen Marguerite there.

Queen Blanche, though a firm believer and steadfastly pious, was a stranger to enthusiasm, and too discreet and too politic to make it the dominating principle of her son's life any more than of her own.

In fact Blanche was an ideal woman, a comforter and a helper.

" So Mrs. Blanche, being now a good deal taken up with her observations of those friends of hers and ours, began to be rather careless of her two old Doctors, who naturally enough fell into conversation with each other across the white surfaces of that lady,perhaps not very politely, but, under the circumstances, almost as a matter of necessity.