Tour de Boulogne than by her own family of Medici.

The position of his niece was so bad and difficult that the republican
Filippo Strozzi, wholly incapable of guiding her in the midst of such
conflicting interests, left her after the first year, being recalled to
Italy by the death of Clement VII. Catherine's conduct, when we remember
that she was scarcely fifteen years old, was a model of prudence. She
attached herself closely to the king, her father-in-law; she left him as
little as she could, following him on horseback both in hunting and in
war. Her idolatry for Francois I. saved the house of the Medici from all
suspicion when the dauphin was poisoned. Catherine was then, and so was
her husband, at the headquarters of the king in Provence; for Charles
V. had speedily invaded France and the late scene of the marriage
festivities had become the theatre of a cruel war.

At the moment when Charles V. was put to flight, leaving the bones of
his army in Provence, the dauphin was returning to Lyon by the Rhone.
He stopped to sleep at Tournon, and, by way of pastime, practised some
violent physical exercises,--which were nearly all the education his
brother and he, in consequence of their detention as hostages, had ever
received. The prince had the imprudence--it being the month of
August, and the weather very hot--to ask for a glass of water, which
Montecuculi, as his cup-bearer, gave to him, with ice in it. The dauphin
died almost immediately. Francois I. adored his son. The dauphin was,
according to all accounts, a charming young man. His father, in despair,
gave the utmost publicity to the proceedings against Montecuculi, which
he placed in the hands of the most able magistrates of that day. The
count, after heroically enduring the first tortures without confessing
anything, finally made admissions by which he implicated Charles V. and
his two generals, Antonio di Leyva and Ferdinando di Gonzago. No affair
was ever more solemnly debated. Here is what the king did, in the words
of an ocular witness:--

"The king called an assembly at Lyon of all the princes of his
blood, all the knights of his order, and other great personages of
the kingdom; also the legal and papal nuncio, the cardinals who
were at his court, together with the ambassadors of England,
Scotland, Portugal, Venice, Ferrara, and others; also all the
princes and noble strangers, both Italian and German, who were
then residing at his court in