inal de Bourbon. The
cardinal was put forward as a stalking-horse, to be discarded at the
right moment. And yet after the _eighth_ civil war, that "of the three
Henrys," the duke had the courage, or the assurance, to come to demand
an audience of the king at Blois, and was poniarded by the
Quarante-Cinq, the royal body-guard, in the antechamber. The next day,
his brother, the cardinal, was killed with halberds, and the two bodies
were burned that there might be no relics.

Catherine de Medicis, if we may believe the historians, had an undoubted
talent for epigrams. When it was announced to her erroneously, as it
afterward proved, that the battle of Dreux, in 1562, had been won by the
Huguenots, she remarked, placidly: "Well, we shall have to pray God in
French." When her son hastened to inform her after this notable
assassination: "I have become, again, King of France, madame, having had
killed the King of Paris," she replied: "It is not enough to cut out, my
son; you must sew up." Henri did not know how to sew up; the League was
far from being killed, the city of Paris, filled with fury and
resentment at this murder, publicly disowned him and closed its gates
against him. In one of the many nocturnal processions in its streets, a
hundred thousand persons, it is said, carrying lighted torches,
extinguished them all at once at a signal, crying, with one voice: "God
extinguish thus the race of Valois!" He was obliged to seek an alliance
with the Bearnais; the two kings laid siege to the capital, and a
fanatical Dominican monk, Jacques Clement, having gained access to the
tent of Henri III by forged letters, buried a knife in his bowels. He
died in the night, having previously made his attendants swear to
recognize the King of Navarre as King of France. His mother had died six
months before, "despair in her soul."

Of Henri IV, "manly and humane by natural gifts, as well as by worldly
experience," there are innumerable anecdotes related to illustrate his
somewhat contradictory character. He is even found apologizing for
Catherine de Medicis. One day, in 1600, the President de Groulard was
recalling to the king the memory of the many ills that she had brought
upon France. "But," said the Bearnais, "I should like to ask you, what
could a poor woman do who had, by the death of her husband, been left
with five small children on her hands and two families who were
endeavoring to wrest the crown from them, ours and that of the