For her who gave him all she had!”
A touching and simple piece. It should have gone home to a man whose intentions were always better than his inclinations, yet always gave way to them. The end of him, sudden and shocking as it was, can have surprised nobody. He had enemies everywhere, and few friends. The Catholics had never believed in him, the Protestants had ceased to believe in him. The day before his last he had had Marie de Médicis crowned with all the forms, though unwillingly. L’Estoile was there, and observed two notable facts: “the first was that it had been thought proper, on account of the subject-matter, to change the gospel of the day, which is from Mark x—“And the Pharisees came to him, and asked him, Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife, tempting him.” That sounds to me a little too apt to be likely.
“The other was that at the largesse of gold and silver coins, which is usual at coronations of kings and queens, there was never a cry Vive le Roy, nor yet a Vive la Reine—which, it was remarked, had never happened but at this coronation.” His next entry relates to the assassination:
“Luctus ubique, pavor, et plurima mortis imago,” is his conclusion of it all: “the shops are shut; everyone goes weeping or holding up his hands, great and small, young and old; women and maids pluck at their hair. The whole town is very quiet: instead of running for arms we run to our prayers, and make vows for the health and welfare of the new king. The fury of the people, contrary to the expectation and intent of the wicked, is turned upon the infamous parricide and his accomplices, seeking only to ensue vengeance and to have it.”
De mortuis! That is always the way. And distrusting the Queen as he plainly did, and abhorring Concini, not the first, and not the best, of the implanted Italians, there is little wonder at the diarist’s dismay. He goes on, without circumlocution, to lay the crime at the door of the “Society of Judas,” as he calls a famous companionship, a society to whose new church the King’s heart had been promised, by whose means, he as good as says, it was now obtained. Not without scandal, it was presently conveyed there.
Enormous crowds viewed the king’s body, which lay in state in the Louvre. The Jesuits were among the first to come; he says:
“Class them as you please: everybody knows the maxim they preach, that it is lawful to kill the king who suffers two religions in his realm. Nevertheless (vultibus compositis ad luctum) they played affliction above everyone. Father Cotton, with an exclamation truly smacking of the Court and the Society, ‘Who is the villain,’ cries he, ‘to have killed this good prince, this pious, this great king? Was it not a Huguenot, then?’ They tell him, No, it was a Roman Catholic. ‘Ah, deplorable, if it be so!’ he says, and signs himself with three great crosses. Someone present, who had overheard him, was himself overheard to say, ‘The Huguenots don’t play those tricks.’”
But the Society took the heart to Notre-Dame-de-Boulogne.
L’Estoile survived to see the little king in Paris. He watched him benevolently always, and has tales to tell of him, of which the prettiest is about Pierrot, a village boy of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. When Louis had been there as Dauphin, Pierrot used to play with him; and now that he was King, and at the Tuileries, he had the notion of going to see him.
“The King was playing down by the lake, with a fine company about him; but as soon as he was aware of Pierrot, his old play-fellow (who still called him M. le Dauphin, and to those who reproved him, swore his round Mordienne that he did not know what else to call him), he left them all where they were to go to Pierrot, into whose arms he flew, and kissed him in the face of everybody. He told M. de Souvrai that they must find clothes for his friend the very next day, so that he might stay with him, but Pierrot said he could not do that, but must go home for fear of being beaten. His father and mother had not been willing to let him go—but he had gone for all that, and had brought M. le Dauphin (he called him) a present of some sparrows.”