we plunged into forest depths that I said to myself: "We
must be coming near Senlis!" For the very name "Senlis" fills the mind
with forest pictures. No wonder, since it lies walled away from the
outer world--like the Sleeping Beauty--by woods, and woods, and woods:
the forests of Hallette, Chantilly, and Ermenonville, each as full of
history as it is now of aromatic scents, and used to be of wild boars
for kings to kill!

I think the best of the forest pictures has Henri de Navarre for its
principal figure. Brian and I turned over the pages of our memory for
the Becketts, who listened like children to fairy tales--or as we
listened when you used to embroider history for us in those evening
_causeries_ in the dear old "den," Padre.

I dug up the story about Henri at twenty-one, married more than a year
to beautiful, lively Marguerite de Valois, and enduring lazily the
despotism of his mother-in-law. There in the old palace of the Louvre,
he loitered the time away, practically a prisoner until the only friend
he had with courage to speak out (Agrippa d'Aubigny) gave him a lecture.
Agrippa lashed his master with the words "coward" and "sluggard,"
letting his faithful servants work for his interests while he remained
the slave of a "wicked old witch." The Bearnais had been biding his
time--"crouching to spring": but that slap in the face set him on fire.
He could no longer wait for the right moment. He decided to make the
_first_ moment the right one. His quick brain mapped out a plan of
escape in which the sole flaw was that he must leave behind his
brilliant bride. With eight or ten of his greatest, most loyal
gentlemen, he arranged to hunt in the forest of Senlis; and he had shown
himself so biddable, so boyish, that at first even Catherine de Medicis
did not suspect him. It was only when the party had set forth that the
plot burst like a bomb, in Catherine's own boudoir, where she sat with
her favourite son, vile Henri III of France.

Fervacques, one of the plotters, had stopped in Paris, feigning illness.
The plan had been concocted in his rooms, and he but waited for
Navarre's back to be turned to betray him. Marguerite laughed when she
heard (perhaps she was in the secret), but Catherine said evil words, of
which she knew a great many--especially in Italian. Orders were given
for the gates of Paris to be shut (gates that in those days barred the
road along which we now motored), but they were too late. Navarre and