The making of a king (29 page)

condemn. Dead, says Michelet, " the people per-jived that they loved Henri-Quatre."

The old order of things, with the rapidity of a

h of lightning, had been swept away ; the new,

four-and-twenty hours, was definitely established.

Yet a scene taking place that afternoon might have seemed to promise well for the future. Sully, conquering his reluctance to enter the Louvre in its present condition, overcoming also, it may be, some lingering apprehension as to the risk he might thereby incur, had come thither at length to wait upon the Queen in deference to her command. As he entered the building, unaccompanied save by his personal attendants, the inferior officers of the royal household, the archers and soldiers of the guard, vied with each other in doing honour to their dead master's favoured servant, recognising and welcoming in him a fellow mourner. Many amongst those of higher rank, on the other hand, were observed to be in no wise cast down, but on the contrary of cheerful countenance.

The Duke was cordially received by the Queen. Mingling her tears with his, she sent for Louis, and admonished him dramatically to love the man who had been one of his father's best servants. As Sully held the boy in his close embrace it may be that, for a moment, he cherished the hope that, as he had served the father, so he might be permitted to serve the son. He was to be speedily undeceived.

The long day—the first of Louis's reign—was drawing to a close. In the mortuary chamber to which he had been removed the dead King lay. The night before he had been served, in accordance with the strange ritual prescribed by tradition, as he had been accustomed to be served in his life-time. The Due de Mayenne had given him his shirt; Bellegarde, Grand Equerry, and Bassompierre, representing the

Due de Bouillon, had assisted at the ghastly ceremony. A deputation composed of twelve Jesuits now waited, first upon Louis, then upon his mother, to proffer, on behalf of their Society, their services ; and, further, to advance their claim to the heart of Henri, which they asserted he had bequeathed as his legacy to the Order. Varenne, high in the late King's confidence, corroborated their statement, and the relic was accordingly delivered over to them, to be carried to La Fleche. And so the reign of Louis XIII. was inaugurated.

The days went by. As in Paris and in France, so at the Louvre, genuine sorrow and conventional mourning — covering and disguising satisfaction—confronted and jostled each other. In the State apartments all the pomp and paraphernalia of woe were displayed. Sable hangings draped the walls ; the decencies of desolation were carefully observed. Yet in the very chants of the requiems it was noticed that, whilst the voices of some of the choristers were broken with sobs, others found no difficulty in showing off their powers to the best advantage. In the entre-sol below the muted chambers, life was carried on as usual. To the indignation of the few faithful to the memory of the past, laughter echoed through the rooms where Marie held secret converse with the men who enjoyed her confidence — Concini and his wife, the papal nuncio, Epernon, the Spanish Ambassador, Villeroy, and others. The accredited Council of State might hold its deliberations elsewhere ; but the Queen-mother—hitherto almost a negligible quantity in politics — ruled supreme;

her will was law. Such was the strange transformation effected by Ravaillac's knife.

To Marie de Medicis all must have had at first somewhat of the unreality of a dream. It is only possible to guess at the sentiments underlying her decent assumption of woe during these early days of widowhood. Setting aside as unproved the dark suspicions that connected her directly or indirectly with the catastrophe, it may be that she has been too harshly judged ; that, with little to attract or to command sympathy or admiration, harder measure has been meted out to her than might have been the case with a woman of a more winning character. As was perhaps inevitable, in the face of her conduct before and after her husband's death, the populace and others insisted on associating her name with that of the man she had so unwisely favoured, and regarded Concini as her lover. Of this, again, there is no proof; but in her blemished reputation she received the deserts of her blind infatuation for the Florentine couple.

For the rest, human nature is full of contradictions, and it may be that her mourning for the dead King was not wholly a tribute to the requirements of convention. Regret does not infrequently follow upon the severance of a tie that has seemed to give scanty cause for it; the prosperous can afford to be pitiful ; and, with the future opening before her, crowded with possibilities she rated at their full value, she may have been touched at times by tenderness or compassion for the dead man now powerless to wrong her; may have remembered that, in spite of his

weakness, his infirmities, and his sins, he was, as she once told the Tuscan envoy, "di dolce natura," and have not been totally devoid of affectionate remembrance.

That it would be unreasonable, as well as idle, to look for more genuine sorrow, posterity will readily admit ; but the fact was not so easily acknowledged by those to whom Henri had been master and friend, the object, in spite of all his shortcomings, of their deepest love and devotion. Of these Sully was chief. Recalling, in after-days, the period following upon the King's death, full of melancholy, and weighted with the sense of irreparable loss, the Duke afterwards drew a picture of the Queen as she then appeared, in which the reader cannot fail to discover, beneath the language of the courtier, the bitterness of sarcasm.

Dwelling, in the first place, in terms of perfunctory and highly coloured panegyric, upon her outward charms, her industry and skill in winning hearts, her magnanimity and constancy in the endurance of sorrow and trouble, he proceeded to dilate upon her conduct at this crisis, bereft in a moment of her dearest delights in the companionship, Jove, and society of a husband for whose loss it must not be doubted— Sully had it on good authority — she felt all the grievous and acute regret corresponding to the greatness of that loss.

So far, notwithstanding the exaggeration of his praise, little in accordance with Sully's custom, the description might have come from the pen of her husband's friend, sincerely convinced that she was a fellow-mourner. In what follows the irony breaks

through its thin disguise. So different, he goes on to say, are appearances often from reality, that, surmounting all grief and subduing the violence of her sufferings, she allowed no sign of them to appear in public, forcing her eyes to restrain their tears, and, the more to conceal her desolation, curbing her inclination to seek those places of sadness and melancholy where alone she could find pleasure, and remaining almost all day with Court and Council in a decorated chamber glittering with gold and silver and purple ; where she was compelled to listen to outbursts of laughter and shouts of rejoicing from those who hoped to profit by the calamity. To all she was an object of admiration, owing to the control she exercised over her suffering spirit, scarcely a trace of it appearing in countenance or words.

Whilst his mother passed her days in the fashion thus indicated, the shock of his father's murder had produced upon the imagination of the little King an effect not easily effaced, and he continued to be haunted by the suggestion it contained of danger to himself. Taken to church on Sunday, he directed the guards by whom he was accompanied to place themselves on either side of his carriage, appealing to them to attend to their duty.

" Guard me well/' he would entreat, " lest they should kill me as they have killed the King, my father."

At night, too, dreams of assassination would visit the nervous child ; and, waking, he would fall into reveries attracting the attention of his attendants.

" C'est que je songeois," he told his nurse, when

she strove to rouse him from one of these fits of abstraction. Then, after another pause, " Doundoun, it is that I would that the King, my father, had lived for twenty years. Ah, the m&chant who killed him ! " " I wish "—he said another time wistfully to Madame de Montglat—" I wish I had not so soon become King, and that the King, my father, were still alive."

It was not unnatural that fears for his personal safety should have clouded the child's mind and mingled with less selfish regrets. Not only was Paris pervaded by a curious terror, as if the murder had affected men's nerves ; but—a common result of a notorious crime—others had been, so to speak, fired by Ravaillac's example, and had been set musing on like achievements. A knife bearing the inscription, " I will do it in my turn," was found in the possession of a freemason said to be in communication with the Archduke. A soldier belonging to the palace guard, rendered reckless by losses at the gaming-table, was heard to boast that, had Henri not been already dead, he would have slain both King and Queen ; and a comrade was arrested on the charge of having declared, pointing to Louis, that he wished his dagger were in the heart of the last of the race.

Stories such as these—due probably to the vagaries of drunkards or of madmen whose diseased imagination had been coloured by the event which was in all men's mouths—may easily, coming to the ears of the boy, have caused him to ponder anxiously over the dangers he ran as he played as usual with his toys, or took his lace, with a gravity and patience surprising to foreign

ambassadors, at his mother's side, giving audience to envoys and nobles, and sharing with decorum in the pageantry of State.

However well he mtght perform his part, the services of the soothsayers who were so busily plying their trade would not have been necessary to enable an observer to predict coming trouble under the new system of government. It is true that, in the initiation of her rule, Marie de Medicis took those who watched her by surprise, and displayed qualities for which few would have given her credit, exhibiting an energy and determination not to be expected from a woman so little experienced in the transaction of public business. But that very determination and energy could not fail to bring her into conflict with others claiming to exercise an influence in public affairs. Having attained the summit of her ambition and possessing supreme power in the State, she did not intend to barter it for ease or tranquillity, nor to act the part—as she told the Comte de Soissons plainly—of a mere Madame de Montglat, charged with the care of her son's person and leaving it to others to steer the vessel. Marie de Medicis meant to rule.

There were, however, obstacles in the way of the accomplishment of her purpose. The attitude assumed by Soissons himself, who had hurried back to the capital on receiving tidings of the catastrophe, and the concessions he had wrung from her, was an earnest of the difficulties with which a woman wholly unused to the conduct of weighty affairs or to the management of men would be forced to contend. Professing, with tears, his loyalty to the Queen and her son, the Count

had at once advanced a demand to be made the King's Lieutenant-General throughout the realm, and, though Marie was resolute in her refusal to accede to his desire, she unwisely sought to propitiate him by the post of Governor of Normandy, usually held by the Dauphin, and vacated by Louis's accession to the throne; his son was promised the government of Dauphiny, and large sums of money were allotted for the payment of his debts.

The result was at once apparent. Conde had not had time to return from Milan, where the news had found him ; but Conti, Soissons's elder brother, was enraged, and Guise, with all the house of Lorraine, took the Prince's part with so much violence that it was necessary to keep the palace guard under arms, lest discontent should burst into open violence. Paris, moreover, always an uncertain factor in party strife, was soon to develop a causeless and disquieting liking for Conde, chief of the Princes of the Blood.

Meantime, whilst the struggle for the sceptre he had dropped went on, Henri-Quatre lay unburied. On June 25 the first ceremony connected with his bsequies took place ; and, having been taken to

e Hotel de Longueville at midday, Louis walked k in procession to the Louvre, to sprinkle his

ther's body with holy water as it lay in state in the lower hall of the palace.

As he passed on, the central figure in the pageant, dressed in purple and the long train of his hooded cloak borne by the Princes of the Blood, it was observed that, though his little brothers, terrified by the funeral array, never ceased sobbing, he did not shed a tear.