Guise be Lieutenant-General of the kingdom. The States-General are to be immediately assembled; and Henri de Guise, once the poetic lover, now hardened into the cold, ambitious bigot—ready to usurp the throne of France to ensure the triumph of the Catholic party, and exclude the King of Navarre—canvasses France, to insure a majority for the Holy League against those pertinacious enemies of orthodoxy, Condé and Navarre.
The King, meanwhile, overridden and humiliated, agrees to everything, and listens complacently to D’Epernon, who tells him, “He will never be king while Guise lives.” So, for the moment, there is peace.
Now the King has left Chartres, and is at Blois. The Balafré and his brother the Cardinal are also there to attend the Parliament, which is summoned, and to make known their grievances. So the sunny little town of Blois, sloping sweetly downwards to the Loire, with its superb castle marked by towers, turrets, broad flat roofs, painted windows, and ample courts, is the theatre on which the great battle is to be fought between the rival houses of Guise and Valois. All the chiefs on either side are to be present at a council which is to precede the meeting of the Assembly. Henry—at the instigation of D’Epernon—the better to play his perfidious game has communicated at the same altar with the Balafré and his brother the Cardinal, and given them the kiss of peace to seal their reconciliation.
Catherine’s apartments are on the first floor of the château,—a gallery-saloon, the diamonded windows set in painted arches overlooking the town, the dark walls, decorated with a crowned C and a monogram in gold; her oratory, with a large oval window where an altar stands; her writing-closet, with many concealed drawers and secrets in the walls—a hidden stair leading to an observatory, and a sleeping-room with a recess for her bed. So unaltered are these rooms that the presence of Catherine still haunts them; she faces one at every step.
In her bed within that recess the great Queen lies dying. She is old and broken, and her mind wanders at times through excess of pain. But she cannot die in peace, for she knows that her son Henry—the last of her race—meditates a hideous crime; a crime in which she would have gloried once, but now, racked with bodily suffering and mental anguish, with remorse for the past and terror for the future, she shudders at the very thought.
She calls him to her. Henry, her beloved Anjou! As he enters her chamber, she struggles upright on her bed. No one would have recognised the majestic Queen in the hideous skeleton that now speaks.
“What are you about to do, my son?” she asks in a tremulous voice; “answer me, Henry. I fear I know too well what is on your mind. God grant you may succeed, but I fear evil will come of it. The Duke and his brother are too powerful.”
“The very reason they should die, my mother. I shall never be King of France while they live.”
“But, Henry,” gasps Catherine, trembling from weakness and excitement, as she clasps her son’s hand, “have you taken measures to assure yourself of the cities? Have you communicated with the Holy Father? Do this, do it at once!”
“Madame, good measures have been taken; trouble not yourself further.”