m; but,
"Sir," said Colonel d'Ornano, going up to the young king, "you are this
minute King of France: Marshal d'Ancre is dead." And the young king,
before the assembled court, repeated with the same tone of satisfaction,
"Marshal d'Ancre is dead." Baron de Vitry was appointed Marshal of
France in the room of the favorite whom he had just murdered. The day
after the murder, the mob rushed into the church of St. German-
l'Auxerrois, where the body of Marshal d'Ancre had been interred; they
heaved up the slabs, hauled the body from the ground, dragged it over the
pavement as far as the Pont-Neuf, where they hanged it by the feet to a
gallows; and they afterwards tore it in pieces, which were sold, burned,
and thrown into the Seine. The ferocious passions of the populace were
satisfied; but court-hatred and court-envy were not; they attacked the
marshal's widow, Leonora Galigai. She resided at the Louvre, and, at the
first rumor of what had happened, she had sent to demand asylum with the
queen-mother. Meeting with a harsh refusal, she had undressed herself in
order to protect with her body her jewels which she had concealed in her
mattresses. The moment she was discovered, she was taken to the Bastille
and brought before the Parliament. She began by throwing all the blame
upon her husband; it was he, she said, who had prevented her from
retiring into Italy, and who had made every attempt to push his fortunes
farther. When she was sentenced to death, Leonora recovered her courage
and pride. "Never," said a contemporary, "was anybody seen of more
constant and resolute visage." "What a lot of people to look at one poor
creature!" said she at sight of the crowd that thronged upon her passage.
There is nothing to show that her firmness at the last earned her more of
sympathy than her weaknesses had brought her of compassion. The mob has
its seasons of pitilessness. Leonora Galigai died leaving one child, a
son, who was so maltreated that he persisted in refusing all food, and,
at last, would take nothing but the sweetmeats that the young queen, Anne
of Austria, married two years before to Louis XIII., had the kindness to
send him.

We encounter in this very insignificant circumstance a trace of one of
those important events which marked the earliest years of Mary de'
Medici's regency and the influence of her earliest favorites. Concini
and his wife, both of them, probably, in the secret service of the court
of Ma