These predictions, which were known to the Cardinal de Lorraine, who regarded them as witchcraft, were now in process of realization.  Francois II. had reigned his two revolutions of the wheel, and Charles IX. was now making his last turn.  If Catherine said the strange words which history has attributed to her when her son Henri started for Poland,—­“You will soon return,”—­they must be set down to her faith in occult science and not to the intention of poisoning Charles IX.

Many other circumstances corroborated Catherine’s faith in the occult sciences.  The night before the tournament at which Henri II. was killed, Catherine saw the fatal blow in a dream.  Her astrological council, then composed of Nostradamus and the two Ruggieri, had already predicted to her the death of the king.  History has recorded the efforts made by Catherine to persuade her husband not to enter the lists.  The prognostic, and the dream produced by the prognostic, were verified.  The memoirs of the day relate another fact that was no less singular.  The courier who announced the victory of Moncontour arrived in the night, after riding with such speed that he killed three horses.  The queen-mother was awakened to receive the news, to which she replied, “I knew it already.”  In fact, as Brantome relates, she had told of her son’s triumph the evening before, and narrated several circumstances of the battle.  The astrologer of the house of Bourbon predicted that the youngest of all the princes descended from Saint-Louis (the son of Antoine de Bourbon) would ascend the throne of France.  This prediction, related by Sully, was accomplished in the precise terms of the horoscope; which led Henri IV. to say that by dint of lying these people sometimes hit the truth.  However that may be, if most of the great minds of that epoch believed in this vast science,—­called Magic by the masters of judicial astrology, and Sorcery by the public,—­they were justified in doing so by the fulfilment of horoscopes.

It was for the use of Cosmo Ruggiero, her mathematician, astronomer, and astrologer, that Catherine de’ Medici erected the tower behind the Halle aux Bles,—­all that now remains of the hotel de Soissons.  Cosmo Ruggiero possessed, like confessors, a mysterious influence, the possession of which, like them again, sufficed him.  He cherished an ambitious thought superior to all vulgar ambitions.  This man, whom dramatists and romance-writers depict as a juggler, owned the rich abbey of Saint-Mahe in Lower Brittany, and refused many high ecclesiastical dignities; the gold which the superstitious passions of the age poured into his coffers sufficed for his secret enterprise; and the queen’s hand, stretched above his head, preserved every hair of it from danger.

II

SCHEMES AGAINST SCHEMES