, concluded by assuring the monarch that if he would submit to
absent himself from all the great cities of his kingdom during the
months specified, he (the Cardinal) would answer with his life that he
should escape the threatened peril.

This intimation, extraordinary as it seems, was, however, insignificant
beside another which reached Henry at the same period through the
Marquis Dufresne, his ambassador at the Court of Constantinople, who was
instructed by the Sultan to desire him to take off the heads of the six
principal nobles of his nation immediately on the receipt of his letter,
and to be upon his guard against the greatest lady in his dominions, as
well as against three persons who were in her confidence, whom he
advised him to imprison during their lives, the whole of them being
implicated in the plot.[423]

Both these communications may, however, find a probable solution in the
circumstance of their having been made by individuals who had obtained
information of a conspiracy against the life of the French King, a
supposition rendered the more rational by the fact that although aware
of the formidable army then organized in France, the Austrians made no
preparation to resist a force which they were conscious was to be used
against themselves; an inertness which could only be accounted for by
the supposition that they were about to employ other and surer methods
of evading the threatened evil.[424] But in addition to these probably
political prophecies, others of a still more singular nature were made
to Henry of his approaching fate. A young female named Anne de Comans
voluntarily declared that a fatal conspiracy had been organized, whose
avowed object was to terminate the existence of the monarch by violence,
and even after his death she persisted in maintaining the truth of her
assertion, not only orally but in writing; for which persistence she was
pronounced to be insane, and so closely confined in an asylum for
lunatics as actually to become in a few months the madwoman which she
had been represented, although it would appear that great doubts were
entertained as to her previous hallucination.[425] Six months before his
death the King being in the house of Zamet retired immediately that he
had dined to a private apartment, whence he sent to summon Thomassin,
one of the most celebrated astrologers of the time, whom he interrogated
respecting his own future destiny and that of his kingdom. In reply he
was