“La Brosse, my boy,” replied Henry, looking at the paper, “is an old fox. Do you not see that he wants money? You are a young fool to mind him. My life is in the hands of God, my son,—I shall live or die as he pleases,—let me pass.”
He heard mass early, and passed the day as usual. At a quarter to four o’clock in the afternoon he ordered his coach, to visit Sully at the Arsenal, who was ailing. The streets were much crowded. Paris was full of strangers, assembled for the coronation, and to see the spectacle of the Queen’s public entry. Stages and booths blocked up the thoroughfares. Henry was impatient for the arrival of his coach, and took his seat in it immediately it arrived. He signed to the Duc d’Epernon to seat himself at his right hand. De Liancourt and Mirabeau, his lords in waiting, placed themselves opposite to him. The Ducs de Lavardin, Roquelaure, and Montbazon, and the Marquis de la Force, took their places on either side. Besides these noblemen seated inside, a few guards accompanied him on horseback, but when he reached the hôtel of the Duc de Longueville, the King stopped and dismissed all his attendants, save those lords in the coach with him. From the Rue Saint-Honoré, which was greatly crowded, they entered the Rue de la Ferronnière, on the way to the Arsenal. This was a narrow street, and numbers of wooden stalls (such as are still seen on the boulevards in Paris) were ranged along a dead wall, on one of the sides. There was a block of carts about these booths, and the royal coach was obliged to draw up close against the dead wall. The running footmen went forward to clear the road; the coach halted close to the wall. Ravaillac now slipped between the wall and the coach, and jumping on one of the wheels, stabbed the King twice in the breast and ribs. The knife passed through a shirt of fine cambric, richly embroidered à jour. A third time the assassin raised his hand to strike, but only ripped up the sleeve of the Duc de Montbazon’s doublet, upon whom the King had fallen. “I am wounded,” gasped Henry, “but it is nothing—” Then the Duc d’Epernon raised his royal master in his arms. Henry made a convulsive effort to speak, he was choked by blood, and fell back lifeless. He was brought back dead to the Louvre. There he lay in state, clothed in his coronation robes, the crown upon his head.
The bloody almanack had told true. Henry had circled twenty times the magic chamber of life!
CHAPTER XXIX.
LOUIS XIII.
IT is related that the night after the assassination of Henri Quatre by Ravaillac, and while his body lay in the Louvre, his little son, Louis XIII., screaming with terror, cried out that he saw the same men who had murdered his father coming to kill him. Louis was not to be pacified until he was carried to his mother’s bed, where he passed the rest of the night.
To this infantine terror, this early association with death and murder, may be traced the strange character of Louis; weak in body and mind, timid, suspicious, melancholy, superstitious, an undutiful son, a bad husband, and an unworthy king. The fame of his great father, and the enthusiasm his memory inspired, instead of filling him with emulation, crushed and depressed him. He became a complete “Roi fainéant.” His reign was the reign of favourites, and nothing was heard of the monarch but in connection with them, save that, with a superstition worthy of the Middle Ages, he formerly placed France “under the protection of the Virgin.”
His early favourite, Albret the Gascon, created Duc de Luynes and Constable of France, was his tyrant. As long as he lived Louis both hated and feared him. He hated his mother, he hated Richelieu, he hated his wife, Anne of Austria. Louis, surnamed “the Just,” had a great capacity for hatred.
Poor Anne of Austria, to whom he was married at fifteen, she being the same age, what a lot was hers!
Her personal charms actually revolted the half-educated, awkward boy, whom all the world thought she would govern despotically. He could not help acknowledging her exceeding loveliness; but she was his superior, and he knew it. He shrank back, terrified, at her vivacity and her talents. Her innocent love of amusement jarred against his morbid nature. Melancholy himself, he disliked to see others happy, and from the day of their marriage he lived as much apart from her as state etiquette permitted.
Maria de’ Medici, ambitious and unprincipled as ever, widened the breach between them. She still sat supreme in the council, and regulated public affairs. Richelieu, her favourite and minister during the Regency, in continual dread of a possible reconciliation between Louis and his wife, and in love with the young Queen himself, was rapidly rising to that dictatorship which he exercised over France and the King until he died. Both he and the Queen-mother roused Louis’s jealousy against his wife, and dropped dark hints of danger to his throne, perhaps to his life. They succeeded only too well; the King and Queen become more and more estranged.