Page:Catherine of Bragança, infanta of Portugal, & queen-consort of England.djvu/213



NDEED Catherine had begun to see that her conventual breeding left her an outcast from the gay Court. She could not bear the sight of her passionately loved husband dancing with her rival, while she sat and looked on. At first she took up dancing, it would seem, from the eager desire to please Charles, and keep him at her side. Soon she became vehemently fond of it for its own sake, and those historians who take on themselves to declare that she made herself ridiculous by taking up an exercise for which her figure unfitted her, are absurdly without grounds for the assertion. De Gramont says of her that she "added little lustre to the Court by her person or her retinue," when she first arrived, and that "she was far from shining in a charming Court where she came to reign. However, she succeeded well enough afterwards." He also takes pains to say that Catherine was "a woman of wit, and employed all her care to please the King by such compliant, obliging actions as her affection made natural to her. She was very intent upon procuring diversions and amusements, especially such as she was to bear herself in." After these pathetic struggles to regain her lost influence over her husband, and win back his love, it is somewhat hard that Catherine should have