e Montmorency. If you should
marry her I should hate you. If she should love me you would hate me. A
breach of our friendship would desolate me, for I love you with sincere
affection."

That was enough for Bassompierre. He had no mind to go further with a
marriage of convenience which in the sequel would most probably give him
to choose between assuming the ridiculous role of a complacent husband
and being involved in a feud with his prince. He said as much, and
thanked the King for his frankness, whereupon Henry, liking him more
than ever for his good sense, further opened his mind to him.

"I am thinking of marrying her to my nephew, Conde. Thus I shall have
her in my family to be the comfort of my old age, which is coming on.
Conde, who thinks of nothing but hunting, shall have a hundred thousand
livres a year with which to amuse himself."

Bassompierre understood perfectly the kind of bargain that was in
Henry's mind. As for the Prince de Conde, he appears to have been less
acute, no doubt because his vision was dazzled by the prospect of a
hundred thousand livres a year. So desperately poor was he that for half
that sum he would have taken Lucifer's own daughter to wife, without
stopping to consider the disadvantages it might entail.

The marriage was quietly celebrated at Chantilly in February of 1609.
Trouble followed fast. Not only did Conde perceive at last precisely
what was expected of him, and indignantly rebel against it, but the
Queen, too, was carefully instructed in the matter by Concino Concini
and his wife Leonora Galigai, the ambitious adventurers who had come
from Florence in her train, and who saw in the King's weakness their own
opportunity.

The scandal that ensued was appalling. Never before had the relations
between Henry and his queen been strained so nearly to breaking-point.
And then, whilst the trouble of Henry's own making was growing about
him until it threatened to overwhelm him, he received a letter from
Vaucelas, his ambassador at Madrid, containing revelations that changed
his annoyance into stark apprehension.

When the last Duke of Cleves died a few months before, "leaving all the
world his heirs"--to use Henry's own phrase--the Emperor had stepped in,
and over-riding the rights of certain German princes had bestowed
the fief upon his own nephew, the Archduke Leopold. Now this was an
arrangement that did not suit Henry's policy at all, and being then--as
the result of a wise h