Sidenote: Death of Jeanne d'Albret, June 9, 1572.]

Such were the anxieties of the Queen of Navarre in behalf of a son whom
she had carefully reared, hoping to see in him a pillar of the Protestant
faith. She was to be spared the sight both of those scenes in his life
which might have flushed her cheek with pride, and of other scenes which
would have caused her to blush with shame. At length the last difficulties
in the way of Henry of Navarre's marriage, so far as the court and the
queen were concerned, were removed.[885] Charles and Catharine no longer
insisted that Margaret should be allowed the mass when in Bearn; while
Jeanne reluctantly abandoned her objections to the celebration of the
marriage ceremony in the city of Paris. Accordingly, about the middle of
May the Queen of Navarre left Blois and came to the capital for the
purpose of devoting her attention to the final arrangements for the
wedding. She had not, however, been long in Paris before she fell sick of
a violent fever, to which it became evident that she must succumb. We are
told by a writer who regards this as a manifest provocation of Heaven,
that one of her last acts before her sudden illness had been a visit to
the Louvre to petition the king that, on the approaching festival of
Corpus Christi (Fete-Dieu), the "idol," as she styled the wafer, might not
be borne in solemn procession past the house in which she lodged; and that
the king had granted her request.[886] During the short interval before
her death she exhibited the same devotion as previously to the purer
Christianity she had embraced, mingled with affectionate solicitude for
her son and daughter, so soon to be left orphans. Her constancy and
fortitude proved her worthy of all the eulogies that were lavished upon
her.[887] On Monday, the ninth of June, she died, sincerely mourned by the
Huguenots, who felt that in her they had lost one of their most able and
efficient supports, the weakness of whose sex had not made her inferior to
the most active and resolute man of the party. Even Catharine de' Medici,
who had hated her with all her cowardly heart, made some show of admiring
her virtues, now that she was no longer formidable and her straightforward
policy had ceased to thwart the underhanded and shifting diplomacy in
which the queen mother delighted. Yet the report gained currency that
Jeanne had been poisoned at Catharine's instigation. She had, it was said,
bought gloves of Monsieur Rene