in open session, as he exhibited his sword, "It is as
yet in the scabbard; but it will have to leap therefrom unless this
moment there be granted to the queen a title which is her due according
to the order of nature and of justice," the Parliament forthwith declared
Mary regent of, the kingdom. Thanks to Sully's firm administration,
there were, after the ordinary annual expenses were paid, at that time in
the vaults of the Bastille or in securities easily realizable, forty-one
million three hundred and forty-five thousand livres, and there was
nothing to suggest that extraordinary and urgent expenses would come to
curtail this substantial reserve. The army was disbanded, and reduced to
from twelve to fifteen thousand men, French or Swiss. For a long time
past no power in France had, at its accession, possessed so much material
strength and so much moral authority.

[Illustration: Concini, Leonora Galigai, and Mary de' Medici----149]

But Mary de' Medici had, in her household and in her court, the
wherewithal to rapidly dissipate this double treasure. In 1600, at the
time of her marriage, she had brought from Florence to Paris her nurse's
daughter, Leonora Galigai, and Leonora's husband, Concino Concini, son_
of a Florentine notary, both of them full of coarse ambition, covetous,
vain, and determined to make the best of their new position so as to
enrich themselves, and exalt themselves beyond measure, and at any price.
Mary gave them, in that respect, all the facilities they could possibly
desire; they were her confidants, her favorites, and her instruments, as
regarded both her own affairs and theirs. These private and subordinate
servants were before long joined by great lords, court-folks, ambitious
and vain likewise, egotists, mischief-makers, whom the strong and able
hand of Henry IV. had kept aloof, but who, at his death, returned upon
the scene, thinking of nothing whatever but their own fortunes and their
rivalries. They shall just be named here pell-mell, whether members or
relatives of the royal family or merely great lords the Condes, the
Contis, the Enghiens, the Dukes of Epernon, Guise, Elbeuf, Mayenne,
Bouillon, and Nevers, great names and petty characters encountered at
every step under the regency of Mary de' Medici, and, with their
following, forming about her a court-hive, equally restless and useless.
Time does justice to some few men, and executes justice on the ruck: one
must have been of gre