Henri IV's Farewell to Gabrielle d'Estrées

This painting by **Eugénie Latil**, exhibited at the 1842 Salon, depicts the farewell between **Henri IV** and his mistress **Gabrielle d'Estrées**, whom the king has just accompanied to the landing stage at Melun, from where she was to travel on to Paris for her Holy Week devotions. According to the period Salon description, Gabrielle was said to have died poisoned a few days after this scene, without seeing the king again — a claim that belongs to legend rather than established fact: historians today more readily accept death by eclampsia, which occurred on 10 April 1599 while she was pregnant with a fourth child. This nineteenth-century Romantic canvas illustrates the dramatic and largely fantasised afterlife of an episode that nearly altered the course of the Bourbon succession, Henri IV having then intended to marry his mistress rather than Marie de' Medici.