n. That will suffice. Thus I can rid my mind of
apprehensions, and leave Paris with nothing to fear."

"Very well. I will send at once to Notre Dame and to St. Denis, to stop
the preparations and dismiss the workmen."

"Ah, wait." The eyes that for a moment had sparkled with new hope, grew
dull again; the lines of care descended between the brows. "Oh, what to
decide! What to decide! It is what I wish, my friend. But how will my
wife take it?"

"Let her take it as she will. I cannot believe that she will continue
obstinate when she knows what apprehensions you have of disaster."

"Perhaps not, perhaps not," he answered. But his tone was not sanguine.
"Try to persuade her, Sully. Without her consent I cannot do this thing.
But you will know how to persuade her. Go to her."

Sully suspended the preparations for the coronation, and sought the
Queen. For three days, he tells us, he used prayers, entreaties, and
arguments with which to endeavour to move her. But all was labour lost.
Maria de' Medici was not to be moved. To all Sully's arguments she
opposed an argument that was unanswerable.

Unless she were crowned Queen of France, as was her absolute right, she
would be a person of no account and subject to the Council of Regency
during the King's absence, a position unworthy and intolerable to her,
the mother of the Dauphin.

And so it was Henry's part to yield. His hands were tied by the wrongs
that he had done, and the culminating wrong that he was doing her by
this very war, as he had himself openly acknowledged. He had chanced one
day to ask the Papal Nuncio what Rome thought of this war.

"Those who have the best information," the Nuncio answered boldly,
"are of opinion that the principal object of the war is the Princess of
Conde, whom your Majesty wishes to bring back to France."

Angered by this priestly insolence, Henry's answer had been an
impudently defiant acknowledgment of the truth of that allegation.

"Yes, by God!" he cried. "Yes--most certainly I want to have her
back, and I will have her back; no one shall hinder me, not even God's
viceregent on earth."

Having uttered those words, which he knew to have been carried to the
Queen, and to have wounded her perhaps more deeply than anything that
had yet happened in this affair, his conscience left him, despite his
fears, powerless now to thwart her even to the extent of removing those
pernicious familiars of hers of whose plottings he had all but