c. I do not say that in secret or
with his closest friends he did not say things. And this was
the true cause of his death and of the massacre of his friends,
and not the Queen, as was charged, although there are many who
never have been able to get the idea out of their heads that this
was a train long laid and a fuse well concealed. It is false.
The least passionate agree with me, and the more violent and
obstinate think otherwise; and thus very often we credit to kings
and great princes the ordering of the natural course of events,
and say afterwards how prudent and provident they were and how
well they could dissimulate; when all the while they knew nothing
more about it than a plum.

To return again to the Queen, her enemies have given it out that
she was not a good Frenchwoman. God knows with what zeal she urged
that the English be driven from Havre de Grace, and what she said
about it to M. le Prince, and how she made him go, with many
cavaliers of his party, with the crown-companies of M. Andelot,
and other Huguenots, and how she herself led this army, usually
on horseback, like a second beautiful Queen Marfisa, exposing
herself to the arquebusades and the cannonades like one of her
captains, always watching the batteries, and saying that she
would never be at ease until she had taken this city, and driven
the English out of France, and hating worse than poison those who
had sold it to them. And she accomplished so much that finally
she restored it to France.

When Rouen was besieged I saw her in the greatest of fury, when
she saw enter English reinforcements, by means of a French galley
captured the year before, fearing that this place, failing to
be captured by us, might fall into the control of the English.
For this reason she "pushed hard at the wheel," as the saying
is, to capture it, and never failed to come each day to the fort
Sainte-Catherine to hold council and to watch the bombardment.

I have often seen her passing along the covered way to
Sainte-Catherine, while the arquebusades and cannonades rained
shot around her, and her paying no attention to them. Those who
were there saw it as well as I. There are living to-day ladies
who accompanied her, to whom the firing was not pleasant (I know
this for I saw them there), and when M. le Connetable and M. le
Guise remonstrated with her, telling her some accident might
happen to her, she merely laughed and said that she saw no reason
why she should sp