[Illustration:  Murder of Marshal d’Ancre——­155]

The officer fired upon him, and so did several others.  It was never known, or, at any rate, never told, whose shot it was that hit him; but, “Sir,” said Colonel d’Ornano, going up to the young king, “you are this minute King of France:  Marshal d’Ancre is dead.”  And the young king, before the assembled court, repeated with the same tone of satisfaction, “Marshal d’Ancre is dead.”  Baron de Vitry was appointed Marshal of France in the room of the favorite whom he had just murdered.  The day after the murder, the mob rushed into the church of St. German-l’Auxerrois, where the body of Marshal d’Ancre had been interred; they heaved up the slabs, hauled the body from the ground, dragged it over the pavement as far as the Pont-Neuf, where they hanged it by the feet to a gallows; and they afterwards tore it in pieces, which were sold, burned, and thrown into the Seine.  The ferocious passions of the populace were satisfied; but court-hatred and court-envy were not; they attacked the marshal’s widow, Leonora Galigai.  She resided at the Louvre, and, at the first rumor of what had happened, she had sent to demand asylum with the queen-mother.  Meeting with a harsh refusal, she had undressed herself in order to protect with her body her jewels which she had concealed in her mattresses.  The moment she was discovered, she was taken to the Bastille and brought before the Parliament.  She began by throwing all the blame upon her husband; it was he, she said, who had prevented her from retiring into Italy, and who had made every attempt to push his fortunes farther.  When she was sentenced to death, Leonora recovered her courage and pride.  “Never,” said a contemporary, “was anybody seen of more constant and resolute visage.”  “What a lot of people to look at one poor creature!” said she at sight of the crowd that thronged upon her passage.  There is nothing to show that her firmness at the last earned her more of sympathy than her weaknesses had brought her of compassion.  The mob has its seasons of pitilessness.  Leonora Galigai died leaving one child, a son, who was so maltreated that he persisted in refusing all food, and, at last, would take nothing but the sweetmeats that the young queen, Anne of Austria, married two years before to Louis XIII., had the kindness to send him.

We encounter in this very insignificant circumstance a trace of one of those important events which marked the earliest years of Mary de’ Medici’s regency and the influence of her earliest favorites.  Concini and his wife, both of them, probably, in the secret service of the court of Madrid, had promoted the marriage of Louis XIII. with the Infanta Anne of Austria, eldest daughter of Philip III., King of Spain, and that of Philip, Infante of Spain, who was afterwards Philip IV., with Princess Elizabeth of France, sister of Louis XIII.  Henry IV., in his plan for the pacification of Europe, had himself conceived