Oppressed by this double weight of regret and anxiety, Marie and her Court returned to the Louvre; but her grief was still fated to be fearfully increased, for she had scarcely established herself in the palace when her maternal terrors were suddenly awakened by intelligence of the dangerous illness of her second son, the Duc d’Orleans, upon which she hastened to St. Germain.  The fiat had, however, gone forth, and two days subsequently the little Prince, upon whose precocious intellect and sweetness of disposition so many hopes had been built up, was a corpse in his mother’s arms; and within a few hours Madame de Lorraine and her brother had taken leave of their illustrious relative, while the Court of the Louvre, so lately giddy with gaiety, was once more draped in sables.[123]

Devotedly attached to her children, the Queen was for a time inconsolable; her greatness was embittered by private suffering, and her authority was endangered by intestine broils; she looked around her, and scarcely knew upon whom to depend, or upon what to lean.  The constant exactions of the Princes convinced her of the utter hopelessness of satisfying their venality, and securing their allegiance, save by sacrifices which gradually tended to diminish her own power, and to compromise the interests of the Crown, while the people murmured at the burthens inflicted upon them in order to gratify the greed of the nobility.

To increase her anxiety, the death of her second son was destined to add to the number of malcontents by whom the Queen was surrounded, all the principal officers of his household advancing their claim to be transferred to that of the infant Duc d’Anjou, who, on the demise of the Duc d’Orleans, assumed the title of Monsieur, as only brother of the King.  It was, however, impossible to place all these candidates about the person of the young Prince, and it was ultimately decided that M. de Breves,[124] a relative of M. de Villeroy, to whom the appointment had already been promised by Henri IV, should be selected as the preceptor of Monsieur, to the exclusion of M. de Bethune, who had held the same post about the Duc d’Orleans, and who consequently demanded to be transferred to the service of his brother.  But the relative of Sully was little likely to prove a successful candidate; he had owed his previous appointment to the influence of the powerful kinsman whose counsels swayed the actions of a great monarch; that monarch was now in his grave, and that kinsman in honourable exile; and his claim was no longer admitted.  The Marquis de Coeuvres, who had been master of the wardrobe to the deceased Prince, was fated to be equally disappointed.  The ministers had not forgotten that he had been an active agent in the proposed alliance between the Comte de Soissons and Concini, and they did not fail to impress upon the Queen the extreme danger of placing an individual of so resolute and enterprising a character about the person of the heir presumptive.  As