untrustworthy. "He is an exceedingly weak person"--_suggetto
debolissimo_--said Suriano. "As to his judgment, I shall not stop to say
that he wears rings on his fingers and pendants in his ears like a
woman, although he has a gray beard and bears the burden of many years;
and that in great matters he listens to the counsels of flatterers and
vain men, of whom he has a thousand about him."[976] Liberal in
promises, and exhibiting occasional sparks of courage, the fire of
Antoine's resolution soon died out, and he earned the reputation of
being no more formidable than the most treacherous of advocates.
Sensual indulgence had sapped the very foundations of his
character.[977] It is true that his friends, forgetting the
disappointment engendered by his recent displays of timidity, reminded
him again of the engagements into which he had entered, to interfere in
defence of the oppressed, of his glorious opportunity, and of his
accountability before the Divine Tribunal.[978] But their appeals
accomplished little. Catharine was able to boast, in a letter to the
French Ambassador at Madrid, just a fortnight after the death of
Francis, that "she had great reason to be pleased" with Navarre's
conduct, for "he had placed himself altogether in her hands, and had
despoiled himself of all power and authority." "I dispose of him," she
said, "just as I please."[979] And to her daughter, Queen Isabella of
Spain, she wrote by the same courier: "He is so obedient; he has no
authority save that which I permit him to exercise."[980] The
apprehensions felt by Philip the Second regarding the exaltation of a
heretic, in the person of his hated neighbor of Navarre, to the first
place in the vicinage of the French throne, might well be quieted after
such reassuring intelligence.

[Sidenote: Financial embarrassment.]

[Sidenote: The religions situation.]

[Sidenote: Catharine's neutrality.]

Yet the position of Catharine, it must be admitted, was by no means an
easy one. The ablest statesman might have shrunk from coping with the
financial difficulties that beset her. The crown was almost hopelessly
involved. Henry the Second had in the course of a dozen years
accumulated, by prodigal gifts and by needless wars, a debt--enormous
for that age--of forty-two millions of francs, besides alienating the
crown lands and raising by taxation a larger sum of money than had been
collected in eighty years previous.[981] The Venetian Michele summed up
th