his pace. In an instant he was at the
door. With his cloak dropped from his shoulders, and a long knife in his
hand, he set his foot upon a guardstone, thrust his head and shoulders
into the coach, and with frantic force stabbed thrice at the King's
heart. A broken exclamation, a gasping convulsion,--and then the grim
visage drooped on the bleeding breast. Henry breathed his last, and the
hope of Europe died with him.

The omens were sinister for Old France and for New. Marie de Medicis,
"cette grosse banquiere," coarse scion of a bad stock, false wife
and faithless queen, paramour of an intriguing foreigner, tool of the
Jesuits and of Spain, was Regent in the minority of her imbecile son.
The Huguenots drooped, the national party collapsed, the vigorous hand
of Sully was felt no more, and the treasure gathered for a vast and
beneficent enterprise became the instrument of despotism and the prey
of corruption. Under such dark auspices, young Biencourt entered the
thronged chambers of the Louvre.

He gained audience of the Queen, and displayed his list of baptisms;
while the ever present Jesuits failed not to seize him by the button,
assuring him, not only that the late King had deeply at heart the
establishment of their Society in Acadia, but that to this end he had
made them a grant of two thousand livres a year. The Jesuits had found
an ally and the intended mission a friend at court, whose story and
whose character are too striking to pass unnoticed.

This was a lady of honor to the Queen, Antoinette de Pons, Marquise
de Guercheville, once renowned for grace and beauty, and not less
conspicuous for qualities rare in the unbridled court of Henry's
predecessor, where her youth had been passed. When the civil war was at
its height, the royal heart, leaping with insatiable restlessness from
battle to battle, from mistress to mistress, had found a brief repose
in the affections of his Corisande, famed in tradition and romance;
but Corisande was suddenly abandoned, and the young widow, Madame de
Guercheville, became the load-star of his erratic fancy. It was an evil
hour for the Bearnais. Henry sheathed in rusty steel, battling for his
crown and his life, and Henry robed in royalty and throned triumphant in
the Louvre, alike urged their suit in vain. Unused to defeat, the King's
passion rose higher for the obstacle that barred it. On one occasion he
was met with an answer not unworthy of record:--

"Sire, my rank, perha