Conde,
but Conde at the outset, on arriving at the Louvre, offered his heart to
the Queen as a sheet of white paper. Epernon and Soissons received him
with delight, and exchanged vows of an eternal friendship of several
weeks' duration. And thus all the princes of the blood, all the cousins
of Henry of Navarre, except the imbecile Conti, were ranged on the side
of Spain, Rome, Mary de' Medici, and Concino Concini, while the son of
the Balafre, the Duke of Mayenne, and all their adherents were making
common cause with the Huguenots. What better example had been seen
before, even in that country of pantomimic changes, of the effrontery
with which Religion was made the strumpet of Political Ambition?

All that day and the next Paris was rife with rumours that there was to
be a general massacre of the Huguenots to seal the new-born friendship of
a Conde with a Medici. France was to renounce all her old alliances and
publicly to enter into treaties offensive and defensive with Spain. A
league like that of Bayonne made by the former Medicean Queen-Regent of
France was now, at Villeroy's instigation, to be signed by Mary de'
Medici. Meantime, Marshal de la Chatre, an honest soldier and fervent
Papist, seventy-three years of age, ignorant of the language, the
geography, the politics of the country to which he was sent, and knowing
the road thither about as well, according to Aerssens, who was requested
to give him a little preliminary instruction, as he did the road to
India, was to co-operate with Barneveld and Maurice of Nassau in the
enterprise against the duchies.

These were the cheerful circumstances amid which the first step in the
dead Henry's grand design against the House of Austria and in support of
Protestantism in half Europe and of religious equality throughout
Christendom, was now to be ventured.

Cornelis van der Myle took leave of the Queen on terminating his brief
special embassy, and was fain to content himself with languid assurances
from that corpulent Tuscan dame of her cordial friendship for the United
Provinces. Villeroy repeated that the contingent to be sent was furnished
out of pure love to the Netherlands, the present government being in no
wise bound by the late king's promises. He evaded the proposition of the
States for renewing the treaty of close alliance by saying that he was
then negotiating with the British government on the subject, who insisted
as a preliminary step on the repayment of t