Ten Years Later: Louise de la Valliere by Alexandre Dumas Chapter 37 Page 5

made by the balls of the puritanical followers of Cromwell, when on the 24th of August, 1648, at the time they had brought Charles I.

prisoner to Hampton Court. There it was that the king, intoxicated with pleasure and adventure, held his court — he, who, a poet in feeling, thought himself justified in redeeming, by a whole day of voluptuousness, every minute which had been formerly passed in anguish and misery. It was not the soft green sward of Hampton Court — so soft that it almost resembled the richest velvet in the thickness of its texture — nor was it the beds of flowers, with their variegated hues which encircled the foot of every tree with rose-trees many feet in height, embracing most lovingly their trunks — nor even the enormous lime-trees, whose branches swept the earth like willows,