“At length, however,” says Bassompierre, whose own more than questionable morality did not permit him to enact the censor upon his sovereign, “as he was the best husband in the world, he finished by giving his consent, and delayed his departure until she should have made her public entry into the capital.” [420]

On retiring to his closet the King declared to one or two of his confidential friends, as he had already done on former occasions when the same question had been mooted, that the actual cause of the repugnance which he felt to accede to the wishes of the Queen arose from a firm conviction that her coronation would cost him his life, and that he should never leave Paris in safety, as his enemies could only hope to triumph by depriving him of existence.[421]

“Assuredly,” pursues the quaint old chronicler from whom we have just quoted, “heaven and earth had given us only too many prognostics of what was to happen to him:  it was in the year 1608 that a great eclipse nearly covered the whole body of the sun; in the preceding year 1607 that the terrible comet appeared; after which some three months or thereabout we had two earthquakes; then several monsters born in divers provinces of France; bloody rains that fell at Orleans and at Troyes; the great plague that afflicted Paris in the past year 1609; the furious overflowing of the Loire; next the Cure of Montargis found upon the altar, when he went to celebrate the mass, a scroll by which he was informed that his Majesty would be killed by a determined blow, and the said Cure of Montargis carried the paper to the Due de Sully.  Several conspiracies,” he goes on to say, “must have been formed against the life of this good King, since from twenty quarters he received notice of it.  The Pope Paul V sent him a courier express to warn him to be upon his guard, as very high and powerful ladies and some of the greatest nobles of his Court were involved in a plot against his life.” [422]

What reason the King may have supposed himself to possess for considering his own death to be consequent upon the coronation of Marie, or whether he did actually so combine the two events in his own mind, it were impossible for posterity to decide; but it is at least certain that Rambure himself is not singular in adducing extraordinary coincidences and in lending his support to these superstitious terrors, for it is on record that Cardinal Barberino, who subsequently (in 1623) became Pope under the title of Urban VIII, and who was, at the period of which we now write, celebrated for his acquaintance with the occult sciences, as well as for his skill in astrology, sent a message to the King in the month of January, by which he cautioned him not to sojourn in any large city throughout the whole of the year, but more especially during the months of March, April, May, June, and July; declaring that, should he disregard the warning, he would be assassinated by an unfrocked monk of saturnine temperament