The event
which Marguerite had dreaded had now become impossible, and she at
once[52] forwarded a personal requisition to Rome, in which she declared
that "it was in opposition to her own free will that her royal brother
King Charles IX and the Queen-mother had effected an alliance to which
she had consented only with her lips, but not with her heart; and that
the King her husband and herself being related in the third degree, she
besought his Holiness to declare the nullity of the said marriage." [53]

On the receipt of this application, the Pontiff--having previously
ascertained that the demand of Henry himself was based on precisely the
same arguments, and still entertaining the hope held out to him by
Sillery that the King would, when liberated from his present wife,
espouse one of his own relatives--immediately appointed a committee,
composed of the Cardinal de Joyeuse, the Archbishop of Arles,[54] and
the Bishop of Modena, his nuncio and nephew, instructing them, should
they find all circumstances as they were represented, to declare
forthwith the dissolution of the marriage.[55]

Meanwhile the King, whose first burst of grief at the loss of the
Duchess had been so violent that he fainted in his carriage on receiving
the intelligence, and afterwards shut himself up in the palace of
Fontainebleau during several days, refusing to see the princes of the
blood and the great nobles who hastened to offer their condolences, and
retaining about his person only half a dozen courtiers to whom he was
personally attached, had recovered from the shock sufficiently to resume
his usual habits of dissipation and amusement. In the extremity of his
sorrow he had commanded a general Court mourning, and himself set the
example by assuming a black dress for the first week; but as his regret
became moderated, he exchanged his sables for a suit of violet, in which
costume he received a deputation from the Parliament of Paris which was
sent to condole with him upon the bereavement that he had undergone![56]
while the intelligence which reached him of the presumed treachery of
the Duc de Biron, by compelling his removal to Blois, where he could
more readily investigate the affair, completed a cure already more than
half accomplished. There the sensual monarch abandoned himself to the
pleasures of the table, to high play, and to those exciting amusements
which throughout his whole life at intervals annihilated the monarch in
the man: whi