ole of which the infant had been recognized
as a prince of the blood-royal, although the King had himself refused to
allow the registry of the proceedings until they were revised, and the
obnoxious passages rescinded), could not fail, should she ever become
Queen of France, in the event of her having other children, to plunge
the nation into those very struggles for the succession from which he
had just declared his anxiety to preserve it.

"And this strife, Sire," he concluded fearlessly, "would be even more
formidable and more frightful than that to which you so anxiously
alluded; for you will do well to remember that not only the arena in
which it must take place will be your own beloved kingdom of France,
while the whole of civilised Europe stands looking on, but that it will
be a contest between the son of M. de Liancourt and the King's
mistress--the son of Madame de Monceaux, the divorced wife of an obscure
noble, and the declared favourite of the sovereign; and, finally,
between these, the children of shame, and the Dauphin of France, the son
of Henri IV and his Queen. I leave you, Sire, to reflect upon this
startling fact before I venture further."

"And you do well," said the monarch, as he turned away; "for truly you
have said enough for once." [44]

It will be readily conceived that at the close of this conference M. de
Sully was considerably less anxious than before to effect the divorce of
the infatuated sovereign; nor was he sorry to remind Henry, when he next
touched upon the subject, that they had both been premature in
discussing the preliminaries of a second marriage before they had
succeeded in cancelling the first. It was true that Clement VIII, in his
desire to maintain the peace of Europe, had readily entered into the
arguments of MM. de Marquemont,[45] d'Ossat,[46] and Duperron,[47] whom
the Duke had, by command of the monarch, entrusted with this difficult
and dangerous mission, when they represented that the birth of a dauphin
must necessarily avert all risk of a civil war in France, together with
the utter hopelessness of such an event unless their royal master were
released from his present engagements; and that the sovereign-pontiff
had even expressed his willingness to second the washes of the French
monarch. But the consent of Marguerite herself was no less important;
and with a view to obtain this, the minister addressed to her a letter,
in which he expressed his ardent desire to effect