not lower his
arm quickly enough, and the broken shaft of his lance, glancing up from
the king's breast-plate, lifted his visor and inflicted a mortal wound
over the right eye. Eleven days afterward, he died, and Montgomery paid
with his life for his inadvertence.

[Illustration: LADY IN HOUSE-ROBE. PERIOD, 1816.

From a sketch by F. Courboin.]

Henry "was not yet dead when Catherine de Medicis sent to Diane de
Poitiers an order to restore the crown-jewels, and to retire to one of
her chateaux. 'What!' she exclaimed, 'is the king dead?' 'No, madame,
but he soon will be.' 'So long as he has a finger living,' she replied,
'I wish that my enemies should know that I do not fear them, and that I
will not obey them whilst he is alive. My courage is still invincible.
But when he is dead, I no longer wish to live after him.'

"She did live, however, but she made haste to leave Paris, and withdrew
to her Chateau d'Anet."

The king's death occurred in the midst of his plans to resume the
persecution of the heretics, plans which he had so much at heart that he
had not hesitated to conclude the unfortunate treaty of
Cateau-Cambresis, in the same year, in order to be at liberty to engage
in this crusade against his own subjects. "Sire," said his generals,
Guise and Brissac, as the treaty was signed, "you are giving away in one
day what could not be taken from you in thirty years of reverses." But
Henri "was more religious than the Pope," for, the sovereign pontiff
having sent the Parisians a bull by which he granted them permission to
eat butter, cheese, and eggs during the approaching Lent, the king was
scandalized at this license; the Garde des Sceaux directed the
Lieutenant Criminel to publish, by the public criers, a decree
forbidding the printing and circulating of this bull, and the document
was even publicly burned by order of the king and the Parlement.

Among the ceremonials of public rejoicing attending the wedding of Henri
with Catherine de Medicis was the illuminating, by the royal hand, of
the fire on the eve of Sainte-Jean, on the Place de Greve, in which the
lamentable cries of the cats confined in a basket, and thus consumed,
filled the populace with the wildest delight. Their appetite for cruelty
was soon to be much more fully gratified, for arrangements were made,
after high mass at Notre-Dame and the State banquet in the episcopal
palace, to burn as many Protestants at the stake at once, at several
places,