makes it shoes. This wonderful structure, in
which so many styles may still be seen, so many great deeds have been
performed, is in a state of dilapidation which disgraces France. What
grief for those who love the great historic monuments of our country
to know that soon those eloquent stones will be lost to sight
and knowledge, like others at the corner of the rue de la
Vieille-Pelleterie; possibly, they will exist nowhere but in these
pages.

It is necessary to remark that, in order to watch the royal court more
closely, the Guises, although they had a house of their own in the town,
which still exists, had obtained permission to occupy the upper floor
above the apartments of Louis XII., the same lodgings afterwards
occupied by the Duchesse de Nemours under the roof.

The young king, Francois II., and his bride Mary Stuart, in love with
each other like the girl and boy of sixteen which they were, had been
abruptly transferred, in the depth of winter, from the chateau de
Saint-Germain, which the Duc de Guise thought liable to attack, to
the fortress which the chateau of Blois then was, being isolated and
protected on three sides by precipices, and admirably defended as to its
entrance. The Guises, uncles of Mary Stuart, had powerful reasons for
not residing in Paris and for keeping the king and court in a castle
the whole exterior surroundings of which could easily be watched and
defended. A struggle was now beginning around the throne, between the
house of Lorraine and the house of Valois, which was destined to end in
this very chateau, twenty-eight years later, namely in 1588, when
Henri III., under the very eyes of his mother, at that moment deeply
humiliated by the Lorrains, heard fall upon the floor of his own
cabinet, the head of the boldest of all the Guises, the second Balafre,
son of that first Balafre by whom Catherine de' Medici was now being
tricked, watched, threatened, and virtually imprisoned.

IV. THE QUEEN-MOTHER

This noble chateau of Blois was to Catherine de' Medici the narrowest
of prisons. On the death of her husband, who had always held her in
subjection, she expected to reign; but, on the contrary, she found
herself crushed under the thraldom of strangers, whose polished manners
were really far more brutal than those of jailers. No action of hers
could be done secretly. The women who attended her either had lovers
among the Guises or were watched by Argus eyes. These were times when
p