But soon this good scene changed.  Mary had a foster-sister, Leonora Galligai, and Leonora was married to an Italian adventurer, Concini.  These seemed a poor couple, worthless and shiftless, their only stock in trade Leonora’s Italian cunning; but this stock soon came to be of vast account, for thereby she soon managed to bind and rule the Queen-Regent,—­managed to drive Sully into retirement in less than a year,—­managed to make herself and her husband the great dispensers at Court of place and pelf.  Penniless though Concini had been, he was in a few months able to buy the Marquisate of Ancre, which cost him nearly half a million livres,—­and, soon after, the post of First Gentleman of the Bedchamber, and that cost him nearly a quarter of a million,—­and, soon after that, a multitude of broad estates and high offices at immense prices.  Leonora, also, was not idle, and among her many gains was a bribe of three hundred thousand livres to screen certain financiers under trial for fraud.

Next came the turn of the great nobles.  For ages the nobility of France had been the worst among her many afflictions.  From age to age attempts had been made to curb them.  In the fifteenth century Charles VII. had done much to undermine their power, and Louis XI. had done much to crush it.  But strong as was the policy of Charles, and cunning as was the policy of Louis, they had made one omission, and that omission left France, though advanced, miserable.  For these monarchs had not cut the root of the evil.  The French nobility continued practically a serf-holding nobility.

Despite, then, the curb put upon many old pretensions of the nobles, the serf-owning spirit continued to spread a net-work of curses over every arm of the French government, over every acre of the French soil, and, worst of all, over the hearts and minds of the French people.  Enterprise was deadened; invention crippled.  Honesty was nothing; honor everything.  Life was of little value.  Labor was the badge of servility; laziness the very badge and passport of gentility.  The serf-owning spirit was an iron wall between noble and not-noble,—­the only unyielding wall between France and prosperous peace.

But the serf-owning spirit begat another evil far more terrible:  it begat a substitute for patriotism,—­a substitute which crushed out patriotism just at the very emergencies when patriotism was most needed.  For the first question which in any State emergency sprang into the mind of a French noble was not,—­How does this affect the welfare of the nation? but,—­How does this affect the position of my order?  The serf-owning spirit developed in the French aristocracy an instinct which led them in national troubles to guard the serf-owning class first and the nation afterward, and to acknowledge fealty to the serf-owning interest first and to the national interest afterward.

So it proved in that emergency at the death of Henry.  Instead of planting themselves as a firm bulwark between the State and harm, the Duke of Epernon, the Prince of Conde, the Count of Soissons, the Duke of Guise, the Duke of Bouillon, and many others, wheedled or threatened the Queen into granting pensions of such immense amount that the great treasury filled by Henry and Sully with such noble sacrifices, and to such noble ends, was soon nearly empty.