When Charles IX. openly avowed his passion for Marie Touchet, Catherine showed favor to the girl in the interests of her own desire for domination.  Marie Touchet, who was very young when brought to court, came at an age when all the noblest sentiments are predominant.  She loved the king for himself alone.  Frightened at the fate to which ambition had led the Duchesse de Valentinois (better known as Diane de Poitiers), she dreaded the queen-mother, and greatly preferred her simple happiness to grandeur.  Perhaps she thought that lovers as young as the king and herself could never struggle successfully against the queen-mother.  As the daughter of Jean Touchet, Sieur de Beauvais and Quillard, she was born between the burgher class and the lower nobility; she had none of the inborn ambitions of the Pisseleus and Saint-Valliers, girls of rank, who battled for their families with the hidden weapons of love.  Marie Touchet, without family or friends, spared Catherine de’ Medici all antagonism with her son’s mistress; the daughter of a great house would have been her rival.  Jean Touchet, the father, one of the finest wits of the time, a man to whom poets dedicated their works, wanted nothing at court.  Marie, a young girl without connections, intelligent and well-educated, and also simple and artless, whose desires would probably never be aggressive to the royal power, suited the queen-mother admirably.  In short, she made the parliament recognize the son to whom Marie Touchet had just given birth in the month of April, and she allowed him to take the title of Comte d’Auvergne, assuring Charles IX. that she would leave the boy her personal property, the counties of Auvergne and Laraguais.  At a later period, Marguerite de Valois, queen of Navarre, contested this legacy after she was queen of France, and the parliament annulled it.  But later still, Louis XIII., out of respect for the Valois blood, indemnified the Comte d’Auvergne by the gift of the duchy of Angouleme.

Catherine had already given Marie Touchet, who asked nothing, the manor of Belleville, an estate close to Vincennes which carried no title; and thither she went whenever the king hunted and spent the night at the castle.  It was in this gloomy fortress that Charles IX. passed the greater part of his last years, ending his life there, according to some historians, as Louis XII. had ended his.

The queen-mother kept close watch upon her son.  All the occupations of his personal life, outside of politics, were reported to her.  The king had begun to look upon his mother as an enemy, but the kind intentions she expressed toward his son diverted his suspicions for a time.  Catherine’s motives in this matter were never understood by Queen Elizabeth, who, according to Brantome, was one of the gentlest queens that ever reigned, who never did harm or even gave pain to any one, “and was careful to read her prayer-book secretly.”  But this single-minded princess began at last to see the precipices yawning around the throne,—­a dreadful discovery, which might indeed have made her quail; it was some such remembrance, no doubt, that led her to say to one of her ladies, after the death of the king, in reply to a condolence that she had no son, and could not, therefore, be regent and queen-mother: