ation are allowable in order to shed full
light upon the private and incoherent character of this king, who bears
the responsibility of one of the most tragic events in French history.
In the spring of 1574, at the age of twenty-three years and eleven
months, and after a reign of eleven years and six months, Charles IX.
was attacked by an inflammatory malady, which brought on violent
hemorrhage; he was revisited, in his troubled sleep, by the same bloody
visions about which, a few days after the St. Bartholomew, he had spoken
to Ambrose Pare. He no longer retained in his room anybody but two of
his servants and his nurse, "of whom he was very fond, although she was a
Huguenot," says the contemporary chronicler Peter de l'Estoile. "When
she had lain down upon a chest, and was just beginning to doze, hearing
the king moaning, weeping, and sighing, she went full gently up to the
bed. 'Ah, nurse, nurse,' said the king, 'what bloodshed and what
murders! Ah! what evil counsel have I followed! O, my God! forgive me
them and have mercy upon me, if it may please Thee! I know not what hath
come to me, so bewildered and agitated do they make me. What will be the
end of it all? What shall I do? I am lost; I see it well.' Then said
the nurse to him, 'Sir, the murders be on the heads of those who made you
do them! Of yourself, sir, you never could; and since you are not
consenting thereto, and are sorry therefor, believe that God will not put
them down to your account, and will hide them with the cloak of justice
of His Son, to whom alone you must have recourse. But for God's sake,
let your Majesty cease weeping!' And thereupon, having been to fetch him
a pocket-handkerchief, because his own was soaked with tears, after that
the king had taken it from her hand, he signed to her to go away and
leave him to his rest."

On Sunday, May 30, 1574, Whitsunday, about three in the afternoon,
Charles IX. expired, after having signed an ordinance conferring the
regency upon his mother Catherine, "who accepted it," was the expression
in the letters patent, "at the request of the Duke of Alencon, the King
of Navarre, and other princes and peers of France." According to
D'Aubigne, Charles used often to say of his brother Henry, that, "when he
had a kingdom on his hands, the administration would find him out, and
that he would disappoint those who had hopes of him." The last words he
said were, "that he was glad not to have left any yo