ld. She brought back
to Charles IX. a son, his only son, Charles de Valois, first Comte
d'Auvergne, and afterward Duc d'Angouleme. The poor queen, in addition
to the mortification of her abandonment, now endured the pang of knowing
that her rival had borne a son to her husband while she had brought him
only a daughter. And these were not her only troubles and disillusions,
for Catherine de' Medici, who had seemed her friend in the first
instance, now, out of policy, favored her betrayal, preferring to
serve the mistress rather than the wife of the king,--for the following
reason.

When Charles IX. openly avowed his passion for Marie Touchet, Catherine
showed favor to the girl in the interests of her own desire for
domination. Marie Touchet, who was very young when brought to court,
came at an age when all the noblest sentiments are predominant. She
loved the king for himself alone. Frightened at the fate to which
ambition had led the Duchesse de Valentinois (better known as Diane
de Poitiers), she dreaded the queen-mother, and greatly preferred her
simple happiness to grandeur. Perhaps she thought that lovers as young
as the king and herself could never struggle successfully against the
queen-mother. As the daughter of Jean Touchet, Sieur de Beauvais and
Quillard, she was born between the burgher class and the lower
nobility; she had none of the inborn ambitions of the Pisseleus and
Saint-Valliers, girls of rank, who battled for their families with the
hidden weapons of love. Marie Touchet, without family or friends,
spared Catherine de' Medici all antagonism with her son's mistress; the
daughter of a great house would have been her rival. Jean Touchet,
the father, one of the finest wits of the time, a man to whom poets
dedicated their works, wanted nothing at court. Marie, a young girl
without connections, intelligent and well-educated, and also simple and
artless, whose desires would probably never be aggressive to the
royal power, suited the queen-mother admirably. In short, she made the
parliament recognize the son to whom Marie Touchet had just given birth
in the month of April, and she allowed him to take the title of Comte
d'Auvergne, assuring Charles IX. that she would leave the boy her
personal property, the counties of Auvergne and Laraguais. At a later
period, Marguerite de Valois, queen of Navarre, contested this legacy
after she was queen of France, and the parliament annulled it. But later
still, Louis XI