have bidden the King
to beware the middle of the next month of May. Henry had tweaked the
soothsayer by the beard and made him dance twice or thrice about the
room. To the Duc de Vendome expressing great anxiety in regard to
Thomassin, Henry replied, "The astrologer is an old fool, and you are a
young fool." A certain prophetess called Pasithea had informed the Queen
that the King could not survive his fifty-seventh year. She was much in
the confidence of Mary de' Medici, who had insisted this year on her
returning to Paris. Henry, who was ever chafing and struggling to escape
the invisible and dangerous net which he felt closing about him, and who
connected the sorceress with all whom he most loathed among the intimate
associates of the Queen, swore a mighty oath that she should not show her
face again at court. "My heart presages that some signal disaster will
befall me on this coronation. Concini and his wife are urging the Queen
obstinately to send for this fanatic. If she should come, there is no
doubt that my wife and I shall squabble well about her. If I discover
more about these private plots of hers with Spain, I shall be in a mighty
passion." And the King then assured the faithful minister of his
conviction that all the jealousy affected by the Queen in regard to the
Princess of Conde was but a veil to cover dark designs. It was necessary
in the opinion of those who governed her, the vile Concini and his wife,
that there should be some apparent and flagrant cause of quarrel. The
public were to receive payment in these pretexts for want of better coin.
Henry complained that even Sully and all the world besides attributed to
jealousy that which was really the effect of a most refined malice.

And the minister sometimes pauses in the midst of these revelations made
in his old age, and with self-imposed and shuddering silence intimates
that there are things he could tell which are too odious and dreadful to
be breathed.

Henry had an invincible repugnance to that coronation on which the Queen
had set her heart. Nothing could be more pathetic than the isolated
position in which he found himself, standing thus as he did on the
threshold of a mighty undertaking in which he was the central figure, an
object for the world to gaze upon with palpitating interest. At his
hearth in the Louvre were no household gods. Danger lurked behind every
tapestry in that magnificent old palace. A nameless dread dogged his
footsteps