of age, Jacqueline de Montbel, daughter of Count d’Entremont, herself a widow, who wrote to him “that she would fain marry a saint and a hero, and that he was that hero.”  “I am but a tomb,” replied Coligny.  But Jacqueline persisted, in spite of the opposition shown by her sovereign, Emmanuel Philibert, Duke of Savoy, who did not like his fair subjects to marry foreigners; and in February, 1571, she furtively quitted her castle, dropped down the Rhone in a boat as far as Lyons, mounted on horseback, and, escorted by five devoted friends, arrived at La Rochelle.  All Coligny’s friends were urgent for him to accept this passionate devotion proffered by a lady who would bring him territorial possessions valuable to the Protestants, “for they were an open door to Geneva.”  Coligny accepted; and the marriage took place at La Rochelle on the 24th of March, 1571.  “Madame Jacqueline wore, on this occasion,” says a contemporary chronicler, “a skirt in the Spanish fashion, of black gold-tissue, with bands of embroidery in gold and silver twist, and, above, a doublet of white silver-tissue embroidered in gold, with large diamond-buttons.”  She was, nevertheless, at that moment almost as poor as the German arquebusiers who escorted her litter; for an edict issued by the Duke of Savoy on the 31st of January, 1569, caused her the loss of all her possessions in her own country.  She was received in France with the respect due to her; and when, five months after the marriage, Charles; IX. summoned Coligny to Paris, “to serve him in his most important affairs, as a worthy minister, whose virtues were sufficiently known and tried,” he sent at the same time to Madame l’Amirale a safe-conduct in which he called her my fair cousin.  Was there any one belonging to that august and illustrious household who had, at that time, a presentiment of their impending and tragic destiny?

At the same period, the Queen of Navarre, Jeanne d’Albret, obtained for her young nephew, Henry de Bourbon, Prince of Conde, son of the hero of Jarnac, and companion of Henry of Navarre, the hand of his cousin, Mary of Cleves; and there was still going on in London, on behalf of one of Charles IX.’s brothers,—­at one time the Duke of Anjou and at another the Duke of Alencon,—­the negotiation which was a vain attempt to make Queen Elizabeth espouse a French prince.

Coincidently with all these marriages or projects of marriage amongst princes and great lords came the most important of all, that which was to unite Henry of Navarre and Charles IX.’s sister, Marguerite de Valois.  There had already, thirteen or fourteen years previously, been some talk about it, in the reign of King Henry II., when Henry of Navarre and Margaret de Valois, each born in 1553, were both of them mere babies.  This union between the two branches of the royal house, one Catholic and the other Protestant, ought to have been the most striking sign and the surest pledge of peace between Catholicism