In the meantime, Catherine, undecided whether to strike immediately or to wait, was redoubling her kindness and courtesy and her affectionate overtures; her enemies were in her hands.  Although Jeanne suspected that Catherine was capable of every perfidy, she at times believed that her suspicions were unjust or exaggerated.  The situation between these two great women was indeed a dramatic one:  both were tactful, powerful, experienced in war and diplomacy; both were mothers with children for whose future they sought to provide.  Jeanne’s hesitancy, however, was fatal; physically exhausted from suffering and sorrow, worry and excitement, she suddenly died, in the midst of her preparations for the marriage.  While it is not absolutely certain that her death was due to poison, subsequent events lead strongly to the belief that Catherine was instrumental in causing it—­that, probably, being but the first act toward the awful catastrophe she was planning.

“A few hours before her agony, Jeanne dictated the provisions of her will.  She recommended her son to remain faithful to the religion in which she had reared him, never to permit himself to be lured by voluptuousness and corruption, and to banish atheists, flatterers, and libertines....  She begged him to take his sister, Catherine, under his protection and to be, after God, her father.  ’I forbid my son ever to use severity towards his sister; I wish, to the contrary, that he treat her with gentleness and kindness; and that—­above all—­he have her brought up in Bearn, and that she shall never leave there until she is old enough to be married to a prince of her own rank and religion, whose morals shall be such that the spouses may live happily together in a good and holy marriage.’” D’Aubigne wrote of her:  “A princess with nothing of a woman but sex—­with a soul full of everything manly, a mind fit to cope with affairs of moment, and a heart invincible in adversity.”

It was in deep mourning that her son, then King of Navarre, arrived at Paris; the eight hundred gentlemen who attended him were all likewise in mourning.  “But,” says Marguerite de Valois, “the nuptials took place in a few days, with triumph and magnificence that none others, of even my quality, had ever beheld.  The King of Navarre and his troop changed their mourning for very rich and fine clothes, I being dressed royally, with crown and corsage of tufted ermine all blazing with crown jewels, and, the grand blue mantle with a train four ells long borne by three princesses.  The people down below, in their eagerness to see us as we passed, choked one another.” (Thus quickly was Jeanne d’Albret forgotten.) The ceremonies were gorgeous, lasting four days; but when Admiral Coligny, the Huguenot leader, was struck in the hand by a musket ball, the festive aspect of affairs suddenly changed.  On the second day after the wounding of Coligny, and before the excitement caused by that act had subsided, Catherine accomplished the crowning work of her invidious nature, the tragedy of Saint Bartholomew.