A slight event, occurring at this time, came near compromising the power which Catherine had so painfully built up.  The following scene, preserved in history, took place, on the very day the envoys returned from Geneva, in the hotel de Coligny near the Louvre.  At his coronation, Charles IX., who was greatly attached to his tutor Amyot, appointed him grand-almoner of France.  This affection was shared by his brother the Duc d’Anjou, afterwards Henri III., another of Anjou’s pupils.  Catherine heard the news of this appointment from the two Gondis during the journey from Rheims to Paris.  She had counted on that office in the gift of the Crown to gain a supporter in the Church with whom to oppose the Cardinal de Lorraine.  Her choice had fallen on the Cardinal de Tournon, in whom she expected to find, as in l’Hopital, another crutch—­the word is her own.  As soon as she reached the Louvre she sent for the tutor, and her anger was such, on seeing the disaster to her policy caused by the ambition of this son of a shoemaker, that she was betrayed into using the following extraordinary language, which several memoirs of the day have handed down to us:—­

“What!” she cried, “am I, who compel the Guises, the Colignys, the Connetables, the house of Navarre, the Prince de Conde, to serve my ends, am I to be opposed by a priestling like you who are not satisfied to be bishop of Auxerre?”

Amyot excused himself.  He assured the queen that he had asked nothing; the king of his own will had given him the office of which he, the son of a poor tailor, felt himself quite unworthy.

“Be assured, maitre,” replied Catherine (that being the name which the two kings, Charles IX. and Henri III., gave to the great writer) “that you will not stand on your feet twenty-four hours hence, unless you make your pupil change his mind.”

Between the death thus threatened and the resignation of the highest ecclesiastical office in the gift of the crown, the son of the shoemaker, who had lately become extremely eager after honors, and may even have coveted a cardinal’s hat, thought it prudent to temporize.  He left the court and hid himself in the abbey of Saint-Germain.  When Charles IX. did not see him at his first dinner, he asked where he was.  Some Guisard doubtless told him of what had occurred between Amyot and the queen-mother.

“Has he been forced to disappear because I made him grand-almoner?” cried the king.

He thereupon rushed to his mother in the violent wrath of angry children when their caprices are opposed.

“Madame,” he said on entering, “did I not kindly sign the letter you asked me to send to Parliament, by means of which you govern my kingdom?  Did you not promise that if I did so my will should be yours?  And here, the first favor that I wish to bestow excites your jealousy!  The chancellor talks of declaring my majority at fourteen, three years from now, and you wish to treat me as a child.  By God, I will be king, and a king as my father and grandfather were kings!”