een to
address a letter to her at Brussels, urging her to return to France. But
Mary de' Medici assured her husband that she had no intention of becoming
his assistant, using, to express her thought, the plainest and most
vigorous word that the Italian language could supply. Henry had then
recourse once more to the father and aunt.

That venerable couple being about to wait upon the Archduke's envoy, in
compliance with the royal request, Pecquius, out of respect to their
advanced age, went to the Constable's residence. Here both the Duchess
and Constable, with tears in their eyes, besought that diplomatist to do
his utmost to prevent the Princess from the sad fate of any longer
sharing her husband's fortunes.

The father protested that he would never have consented to her marriage,
preferring infinitely that she should have espoused any honest gentleman
with 2000 crowns a year than this first prince of the blood, with a
character such as it had proved to be; but that he had not dared to
disobey the King.

He spoke of the indignities and cruelties to which she was subjected,
said that Rochefort, whom Conde had employed to assist him in their
flight from France, and on the crupper of whose horse the Princess had
performed the journey, was constantly guilty of acts of rudeness and
incivility towards her; that but a few days past he had fired off pistols
in her apartment where she was sitting alone with the Princess of Orange,
exclaiming that this was the way he would treat anyone who interfered
with the commands of his master, Conde; that the Prince was incessantly
railing at her for refusing to caress the Marquis of Spinola; and that,
in short, he would rather she were safe in the palace of the Archduchess
Isabella, even in the humblest position among her gentlewomen, than to
know her vagabondizing miserably about the world with her husband.

This, he said, was the greatest fear he had, and he would rather see her
dead than condemned to such a fate.

He trusted that the Archdukes were incapable of believing the stories
that he and the Duchess of Angouleme were influenced in the appeals they
made for the separation of the Prince and Princess by a desire to serve
the purposes of the King. Those were fables put about by Conde. All that
the Constable and his sister desired was that the Archduchess would
receive the Princess kindly when she should throw herself at her feet,
and not allow her to be torn away against her wi