When the Duc d’Anjou went to reign in Poland Catherine was deprived of the instrument by which she had worked to keep the king’s passions occupied in domestic intrigues, which neutralized his energy in other directions.  She then set up the conspiracy of La Mole and Coconnas, in which her youngest son, the Duc d’Alencon (afterwards Duc d’Anjou, on the accession of Henri III.) took part, lending himself very willingly to his mother’s wishes, and displaying an ambition much encouraged by his sister Marguerite, then queen of Navarre.  This secret conspiracy had now reached the point to which Catherine sought to bring it.  Its object was to put the young duke and his brother-in-law, the king of Navarre, at the head of the Calvinists, to seize the person of Charles IX., and imprison that king without an heir,—­leaving the throne to the Duc d’Alencon, whose intention it was to establish Calvinism as the religion of France.  Calvin, as we have already said, had obtained, a few days before his death, the reward he had so deeply coveted,—­the Reformation was now called Calvinism in his honor.

If Le Laboureur and other sensible writers had not already proved that La Mole and Coconnas,—­arrested fifty nights after the day on which our present history begins, and beheaded the following April,—­even, we say, if it had not been made historically clear that these men were the victims of the queen-mother’s policy, the part which Cosmo Ruggiero took in this affair would go far to show that she secretly directed their enterprise.  Ruggiero, against whom the king had suspicions, and for whom he cherished a hatred the motives of which we are about to explain, was included in the prosecution.  He admitted having given to La Mole a wax figure representing the king, which was pierced through the heart by two needles.  This method of casting spells constituted a crime, which, in those days, was punished by death.  It presents one of the most startling and infernal images of hatred that humanity could invent; it pictures admirably the magnetic and terrible working in the occult world of a constant malevolent desire surrounding the person doomed to death; the effects of which on the person are exhibited by the figure of wax.  The law in those days thought, and thought justly, that a desire to which an actual form was given should be regarded as a crime of lese majeste.  Charles IX. demanded the death of Ruggiero; Catherine, more powerful than her son, obtained from the Parliament, through the young counsellor, Lecamus, a commutation of the sentence, and Cosmo was sent to the galleys.  The following year, on the death of the king, he was pardoned by a decree of Henri III., who restored his pension, and received him at court.