estitution having, as we have already stated, driven her to the
frightful alternative of denuding the very apartment which was destined
to witness her death-agony of every combustible article that it
contained, in order by such means to prepare the scanty meal that she
could still command--and on a wretched bed which one of her own lackeys
would, in her period of power, have disdained to occupy; childless, or
worse than childless; homeless, hopeless, and heart-wrung, the haughty
daughter of the Medici--the brilliant Regent of France; the patroness of
art; the dispenser of honours; and the mother of a long line of princes.

Surely history presents but few such catastrophes as this. The soul
sickens as it traces to its close the career of this unhappy and
persecuted Princess. Whatever were her faults, they were indeed bitterly
expiated. As a wife she was outraged and neglected; as a Queen she was
subjected to the insults of the arrogant favourites of a dissolute
Court; as a Regent she was trammelled and betrayed; the whole of her
public life was one long chain of disappointment, heart-burning, and
unrest; while as a woman, she was fated to endure such misery as can
fall to the lot of few in this world.

The remains of the ill-fated Marie de Medicis were, in a few hours after
her decease, transported to the Cathedral of Cologne, where they lay in
state an entire week, during which period Rosetti, the Papal Nuncio,
whose dread of Richelieu had caused him to absent himself from the dying
bed, as he had previously done from the wretched home, of the persecuted
Princess, each day performed a funeral service for the repose of her
soul. Her heart was, by her express desire, conveyed to the Convent of
La Fleche; while her body was ultimately transported to France and
deposited in the royal vaults of St. Denis.

The widow of Henri IV had at last found peace in the bosom of her God;
and she had been so long an exile from her adopted country that the
circumstances of her death were matter rather of curiosity than of
regret throughout the kingdom.

The King was apprised of her demise as he was returning from Tarascon,
where he had been visiting the Cardinal, who was then labouring under
the severe indisposition which, five months subsequently, terminated in
his own dissolution. For the space of four days Louis XIII abandoned
himself to the most violent grief, but at the expiration of that period
he suffered himself to be consoled;