ital weaknesses ruined his
entire course. The love of empty glory blinded him to his true interests;
and the love of sensual pleasure made him an easy dupe. He was robbed of
his legitimate claims to the first rank in France by the promise of a
shadowy sceptre in some distant region, which every sensible statesman of
his time knew from the first that Philip the Second never had entertained
the slightest intention of conferring; while, by the siren voices of her
fair maids of honor, Catharine de' Medici was always sure of being able to
lure him on to the most humiliating concessions. Deceived by the
emissaries of the Spanish king and the Italian queen mother, Antoine would
have been an object rather of pity than of disgust, had he not himself
played false to the friends who supported him. As it was, he passed off
the stage, and scarcely left a single person to regret his departure.
Huguenots and papists were alike gratified when the world was relieved of
so signal an example of inconstancy and perfidy.[183] Antoine left behind
him his wife, the eminent Jeanne d'Albret, and two children--a son, the
Prince of Bearn, soon to appear in history as the leader of the Huguenot
party, and, on the extinction of the Valois line, to succeed to the throne
as Henry the Fourth; and a daughter, Catharine, who inherited all her
mother's signal virtues. The widow and her children were, at the time of
Antoine's death, in Jeanne's dominions on the northern slopes of the
Pyrenees, whither they had retired when he had first openly gone over to
the side of the Guises. There, in the midst of her own subjects, the Queen
of Navarre was studying, more intelligently than any other monarch of her
age, the true welfare of her people, while training her son in those
principles upon which she hoped to see him lay the foundations of a great
and glorious career.

[Sidenote: The English in Havre.]

The sagacity of the enemy had been well exhibited in the vigor with which
they had pressed the siege of Rouen. Conde, with barely seven thousand
men, had several weeks before shut himself up in Orleans, after
despatching the few troops at his disposal for the relief of Bourges and
Rouen, and could do nothing beyond making his own position secure, while
impatiently awaiting the long-expected reinforcements from England and
Germany.[184] The dilatoriness that marked the entire conduct of the war
up to this time had borne its natural fruit in the gradual diminution