test of my nephew de Conde before that assembly, and three hundred of
those gentlemen have released him. You wish to shed royal blood and to
decimate the nobility of the kingdom, do you? Ha! in future, I defy you,
and all your schemes, Messieurs de Lorraine. If you order the king's
head opened, by this sword which saved France from Charles V., I say it
shall not be done--"

"All the more," said Ambroise Pare; "because it is now too late; the
suffusion has begun."

"Your reign is over, messieurs," said Catherine to the Guises, seeing
from Pare's face that there was no longer any hope.

"Ah! madame, you have killed your own son," cried Mary Stuart as
she bounded like a lioness from the bed to the window and seized the
queen-mother by the arm, gripping it violently.

"My dear," replied Catherine, giving her daughter-in-law a cold, keen
glance in which she allowed her hatred, repressed for the last six
months, to overflow; "you, to whose inordinate love we owe this death,
you will now go to reign in your Scotland, and you will start to-morrow.
I am regent _de facto_." The three physicians having made her a sign,
"Messieurs," she added, addressing the Guises, "it is agreed between
Monsieur de Bourbon, appointed lieutenant-general of the kingdom by the
States-general, and me that the conduct of the affairs of the State is
our business solely. Come, monsieur le chancelier."

"The king is dead!" said the Duc de Guise, compelled to perform his
duties as Grand-master.

"Long live King Charles IX.!" cried all the noblemen who had come with
the king of Navarre, the Prince de Conde, and the Connetable.

The ceremonies which follow the death of a king of France were performed
in almost total solitude. When the king-at-arms proclaimed aloud three
times in the hall, "The king is dead!" there were very few persons
present to reply, "Vive le roi!"

The queen-mother, to whom the Comtesse de Fiesque had brought the Duc
d'Orleans, now Charles IX., left the chamber, leading her son by the
hand, and all the remaining courtiers followed her. No one was left in
the house where Francois II. had drawn his last breath, but the duke and
the cardinal, the Duchesse de Guise, Mary Stuart, and Dayelle, together
with the sentries at the door, the pages of the Grand-master, those of
the cardinal, and their private secretaries.

"Vive la France!" cried several Reformers in the street, sounding the
first cry of the opposition.

Robertet, who ow