set off at a gallop, rode all night, and arrived next day early on the frontier of Moravia, an Austrian province.  The royal flight created a great uproar at Cracow; the noblemen, and even the peasants, armed with stakes and scythes, set out in pursuit of their king.  They did not come up with him; they fell in with his chancellor only, Guy du Faur, Sieur de Pibrac, who had missed him at the appointed meeting-place, and who, whilst seeking to rejoin him, had lost himself in the forests and marshes, concealed himself in the osiers and reeds, and been obliged now and then to dip his head, in the mud to avoid the arrows discharged on all sides by the peasants in pursuit of the king.  Being arrested by some people who were for taking him back to Cracow and paying him out for his complicity in his master’s flight, he with great difficulty obtained his release and permission to continue his road.  Destined to become more celebrated by his writings and by his Quatrains moraux than by his courtly adventures, Pibrac rejoined King Henry at Vienna, where the Emperor Maximilian II. received him with great splendor.  Delivered from fatigue and danger, Henry appeared to think of nothing but resting and diverting himself; he tarried to his heart’s content at Vienna, Venice, Ferrara, Mantua, and Turin.  He was everywhere welcomed with brilliant entertainments, which the Emperor Maximilian and the senators of Venice accompanied with good advice touching the government of France in her religious troubles; and the nominal sovereign of two kingdoms took nearly three months in going from that whence he had fled to that of which he was about to take possession.  Having started from Cracow on the 18th of June, 1574, he did not arrive until the 5th of September at Lyons, whither the queen-mother had sent his brother, the Duke of Alencon, and his brother-in-law, the King of Navarre, to receive him, going herself as far as Bourgoin in Dauphiny, in order to be the first to see her darling son again.

The king’s entry into France caused, says De Thou, a strange revulsion in all minds.  “During the lifetime of Charles IX., none had seemed more worthy of the throne than Henry, and everybody desired to have him for master.  But scarcely had he arrived when disgust set in to the extent of auguring very ill of his reign.  There was no longer any trace in this prince, who had been nursed, so to speak, in the lap of war, of that manly and warlike courage which had been so much admired.  He no longer rode on horseback; he did not show himself amongst his people, as his predecessors had been wont to do; he was only to be seen shut up with a few favorites in a little painted boat which went up and down the Saone he no longer took his meals without a balustrade, which did not allow him to be approached any Hearer; and if anybody had any petitions to present to him, they had to wait for him as he came out from dinner, when he took them as he hurried by.  For the greater part of the day he remained closeted with some young folks, who alone had the prince’s ear, without any body’s knowing how they had arrived at this distinction, whilst the great, and those whose services were known, could scarcely get speech of him.  Showiness and effeminacy had taken the place of the grandeur and majesty which had formerly distinguished our kings.” [De Thou, Histoire universelle, t. vii. p. 134.]