"And what is it that you are going to do, my good Gaspard?" said the queen.
"To cut off Madame de Valentinois's nose," replied Tavannes, with the utmost gravity and seriousness.
He was just about to leave her, when Catherine, half terrified and half delighted, held him back.
"But, Gaspard, do you realize that it will be your destruction?"
"I do, Madame; but I will save the king and France!"
"Thanks, Gaspard," replied Catherine; "you are a valiant friend no less than a rough soldier. But I command you to be still, Gaspard, and have patience."
"Patience." In truth, that was the watchword by which Catherine de Médicis seemed to have ordered her life up to that time. She, who subsequently was so forward to take her place in the very first rank, had not yet appeared to have any ambition to emerge from the obscurity of the second. She bided her time. And yet she was at this time in the full bloom of a beauty of which Sieur de Bourdeille has left us most minute details; but she sedulously avoided all parade, and it is probably to this modesty that she owed the utter absence of slander in relation to her during her husband's lifetime. There was no one but the brute of a constable who would have dared to call the king's attention to the fact that the ten children that Catherine de Médicis had bestowed on France after ten years of sterility were very little like their father. No other person would have been bold enough to breathe a word against the queen.
It was always Catherine's custom to appear, as she did on this day, not even to notice the attentions which the king lavished on Diane de Poitiers in the sight and bearing of the whole court. After she had soothed the fiery indignation of the marshal she went on talking with her ladies of the races that had taken place, and of the address displayed by Henri.