The tone and manner in which these words were said gave Catherine a revelation of her son’s true character; it was like a blow in the breast.

“He speaks to me thus, he whom I made a king!” she thought.  “Monsieur,” she said aloud, “the office of a king, in times like these, is a very difficult one; you do not yet know the shrewd men with whom you have to deal.  You will never have a safer and more sincere friend than your mother, or better servants than those who have been so long attached to her person, without whose services you might perhaps not even exist to-day.  The Guises want both your life and your throne, be sure of that.  If they could sew me into a sack and fling me into the river,” she said, pointing to the Seine, “it would be done to-night.  They know that I am a lioness defending her young, and that I alone prevent their daring hands from seizing your crown.  To whom—­to whose party does your tutor belong?  Who are his allies?  What authority has he?  What services can he do you?  What weight do his words carry?  Instead of finding a prop to sustain your power, you have cut the ground from under it.  The Cardinal de Lorraine is a living threat to you; he plays the king; he keeps his hat on his head before the princes of the blood; it was urgently necessary to invest another cardinal with powers greater than his own.  But what have you done?  Is Amyot, that shoemaker, fit only to tie the ribbons of his shoes, is he capable of making head against the Guise ambition?  However, you love Amyot, you have appointed him; your will must now be done, monsieur.  But before you make such gifts again, I pray you to consult me in affectionate good faith.  Listen to reasons of state; and your own good sense as a child may perhaps agree with my old experience, when you really understand the difficulties that lie before you.”

“Then I can have my master back again?” cried the king, not listening to his mother’s words, which he considered to be mere reproaches.

“Yes, you shall have him,” she replied.  “But it is not here, nor that brutal Cypierre who will teach you how to reign.”

“It is for you to do so, my dear mother,” said the boy, mollified by his victory and relaxing the surly and threatening look stamped by nature upon his countenance.

Catherine sent Gondi to recall the new grand-almoner.  When the Italian discovered the place of Amyot’s retreat, and the bishop heard that the courtier was sent by the queen, he was seized with terror and refused to leave the abbey.  In this extremity Catherine was obliged to write to him herself, in such terms that he returned to Paris and received from her own lips the assurance of her protection,—­on condition, however, that he would blindly promote her wishes with Charles IX.

This little domestic tempest over, the queen, now re-established in the Louvre after an absence of more than a year, held council with her closest friends as to the proper conduct to pursue with the young king whom Cypierre had complimented on his firmness.