The ignominy with which the body was treated was, as Sully asserts, in accordance with the earnest request of the Duc de Villeroy, who could not disguise from himself the difficulty of his own position; nor was it until after several days' deliberation that Henry, remembering the extent of the confidence placed by the Duke in the traitor by whom his interests had been so seriously compromised, could sufficiently control his indignation to assure him that he in no wise suspected him of complicity, but should continue to regard him with the same trust and favour as heretofore. The people were, however, less amenable; nor did they scruple to accuse M. de Villeroy of participation in the crime of his follower. They could not forget that he had been an active member of the League; and they looked with jealousy upon every transaction in which he was involved; while, fortunately for the Duke, the King was ultimately prevailed upon to believe in the sincerity of his regret, and to remember that since he had attached himself to the royal cause he had rendered essential service to the country; nor did the murmurs of his enemies, who had begun to hope that the treason of his secretary must involve his own ruin, induce the monarch to exhibit towards him either distrust or severity. So lenient, indeed, did the King show himself, that after having being detained for a short time in prison, the Spaniard who had been taken with L'Hôte was set at liberty, as too insignificant for trial, and as the mere tool of his master.[235]
While this affair had monopolized the attention of the King, Madame de Verneuil, enraged by a continual estrangement which threatened the most dangerous results to herself, and resolved at all hazards to recall the attention of the monarch, began to assert more openly and arrogantly than ever her claim upon his hand, and the right of her son to the succession; while at the same time her brother, the Comte d'Auvergne, pretexting a quarrel with M. de Soissons, quitted the Court, and proceeded to the Low Countries, where he had for some time past been actively engaged in organizing a conspiracy, in support of this extravagant and hopeless pretension.
The double personage enacted by the Marquise was one which necessitated the utmost tact and caution, for she was aware that it involved her liberty, if not her life; and consequently, in order to secure the sympathy of the people, while she was at the same time exciting the passions of those discontented nobles who being remnants of the League still retained an unconquerable jealousy of the power by which they had been prostrated, she affected the deepest and most bitter repentance for her past errors, and solicited the permission of the King to retire from France with her children, that she might expiate, by a future of retirement and piety, the faults of which she had been guilty. To this request Henry, without a moment's hesitation, replied by the assurance that she was at perfect liberty to withdraw from the country whenever she saw fit to do so; adding, however, that he would not permit the expatriation of her children, and that before her own departure she must deliver into his hands the written promise of marriage, which, although according to the decision of all the high ecclesiastics of the kingdom totally void and valueless, she had nevertheless been so ill-advised as to render a source of uneasiness and annoyance to the Queen.
This demand was, however, arrogantly rejected, the Marquise declaring that she would neither part with her children nor with a document that rendered her the legal wife of the King; a decision which so incensed Marie de Medicis that she vehemently reproached her royal consort for an act of weakness by which her whole married life had been embittered, and refused to listen to any compromise until the obnoxious paper should be restored.
Thus circumstanced, Henry at length resolved to exert all his authority, and despairing of success through the medium of a third person, he determined himself to visit the Marquise and to exact the restitution of the document. At this period, however, Madame de Verneuil was too deeply involved in the conspiracy of her brother to prove a willing agent in her own defeat, and she accordingly received the monarch with an unyielding insolence for which he was totally unprepared; violently declaring that the promise had been freely given, and that the birth of her son had rendered it valid. In vain did the King insist upon the absurdity of her pretensions; she only replied by sneering at the extraction of the Queen, and asserting her own equality with a petty Tuscan princess, whose gestures and language were, as she declared, the jest of the whole Court. The King, outraged by so gross an impertinence, imperatively commanded her silence upon all that regarded the dignity or pleasure of his royal consort, a display of firmness which more and more exasperated the favourite, who retorted by observing that since the monarch had seen fit to retract a solemn engagement, and thus to brand herself and her children with disgrace, it only remained for her to reiterate her demand for permission to leave the country, with her son and daughter, and her father and brother, both of whom were prepared to share her fortunes, gloomy as they might be, the fear of God not permitting her to recur to the past without the most profound repentance.
To this persistence Henry coldly answered that in his turn he reiterated his declaration that she was at liberty to retire to England whenever she thought proper to do so, and to place herself under the protection of her kinsman, the Earl of Lennox, but that he would not suffer any other member of her family to share her exile; nor should she herself be permitted to reside either in Spain or the Low Countries, where the treasonable practices of the Comte d'Auvergne and the party of the discontented nobles with whom she had recently allied herself, had already given him just cause for displeasure.
Madame de Verneuil, perfectly unabashed by this reproach, assured the King, with a smile of haughty defiance, that she could be as firm as himself where her own honour and that of her children was involved, and added that should he persist in demanding the restoration of the written promise by which he had triumphed over her virtue, he might seek it where it was to be obtained, as he should never receive it from her hands; while as regarded her estrangement from himself, it had ceased to be a subject of regret, as since he had become old he had also become distrustful and suspicious, and his affected favour only tended to render her an object of public jealousy and indignation.
Outraged by this last insult, the King rose angrily from his seat, and without vouchsafing another word to the imperious Marquise quitted the room. It was not, however, in the nature of Henri IV to find himself once more in the presence of his mistress unmoved, and although the indignity to which he had been subjected throughout the interview just described should have sufficed to inspire him only with disgust for the woman who had thus emancipated herself from every observance of respect towards his own person and decency towards the Queen, it is nevertheless certain that his very anger was mingled with admiration; and that not even his sense of what was due to him both as a monarch and as a man could overcome the attraction of Madame de Verneuil. Their temporary separation, during which he had failed to find any equivalent for her wit and vivacity, gave an added charm to every word she uttered; he yearned to see her once more brilliant and happy, devoting her intellect and her fascinations to his amusement; and even while complaining to Sully of her impertinent and uncompromising boldness, he could not forbear uttering a panegyric upon her better qualities, which convinced the minister that their misunderstanding was not destined to be of long duration, an opinion in which he was confirmed when the weak and vacillating Henry, at the close of this enthusiastic apostrophe, proceeded to institute a comparison between the Marquise and the Queen, in which the latter suffered on every point. The earnest wish to please of the favourite was contrasted with the coldness of Marie de Medicis, the wit of the one with the haughty superciliousness of the other; in short, the longer that the King discoursed upon the subject, the more perfect became the conviction of his listener that the late meeting, tempestuous as it was, had sufficed to restore to Madame de Verneuil at least a portion of her former power.