The double personage enacted by the Marquise was one which necessitated
the utmost tact and caution, for she was aware that it involved her
liberty, if not her life; and consequently, in order to secure the
sympathy of the people, while she was at the same time exciting the
passions of those discontented nobles who being remnants of the League
still retained an unconquerable jealousy of the power by which they had
been prostrated, she affected the deepest and most bitter repentance for
her past errors, and solicited the permission of the King to retire from
France with her children, that she might expiate, by a future of
retirement and piety, the faults of which she had been guilty. To this
request Henry, without a moment's hesitation, replied by the assurance
that she was at perfect liberty to withdraw from the country whenever
she saw fit to do so; adding, however, that he would not permit the
expatriation of her children, and that before her own departure she must
deliver into his hands the written promise of marriage, which, although
according to the decision of all the high ecclesiastics of the kingdom
totally void and valueless, she had nevertheless been so ill-advised as
to render a source of uneasiness and annoyance to the Queen.

This demand was, however, arrogantly rejected, the Marquise declaring
that she would neither part with her children nor with a document that
rendered her the legal wife of the King; a decision which so incensed
Marie de Medicis that she vehemently reproached her royal consort for an
act of weakness by which her whole married life had been embittered, and
refused to listen to any compromise until the obnoxious paper should
be restored.

Thus circumstanced, Henry at length resolved to exert all his
authority, and despairing of success through the medium of a third
person, he determined himself to visit the Marquise and to exact the
restitution of the document. At this period, however, Madame de Verneuil
was too deeply involved in the conspiracy of her brother to prove a
willing agent in her own defeat, and she accordingly received the
monarch with an unyielding insolence for which he was totally
unprepared; violently declaring that the promise had been freely given,
and that the birth of her son had rendered it valid. In vain did the
King insist upon the absurdity of her pretensions; she only replied by
sneering at the extraction of the Queen, and asserting her own equality
with a petty