Though the habit of dissimulation, together with advancing age, had given the queen-mother that well-known abbess face, with its haughty and macerated mask, expressionless yet full of depth, inscrutable yet vigilant, remarked by all who have studied her portrait, the courtiers now observed some clouds on her icy countenance.  No sovereign was ever so imposing as this woman from the day when she succeeded in restraining the Guises after the death of Francois II.  Her black velvet cap, made with a point upon the forehead (for she never relinquished her widow’s mourning) seemed a species of feminine cowl around the cold, imperious face, to which, however, she knew how to give, at the right moment, a seductive Italian charm.  Catherine de’ Medici was so well made that she was accused of inventing side-saddles to show the shape of her legs, which were absolutely perfect.  Women followed her example in this respect throughout Europe, which even then took its fashions from France.  Those who desire to bring this grand figure before their minds will find that the scene now taking place in the brown hall of the Louvre presents it in a striking aspect.

The two queens, different in spirit, in beauty, in dress, and now estranged,—­one naive and thoughtful, the other thoughtful and gravely abstracted,—­were far too preoccupied to think of giving the order awaited by the courtiers for the amusements of the evening.  The carefully concealed drama, played for the last six months by the mother and son was more than suspected by many of the courtiers; but the Italians were watching it with special anxiety, for Catherine’s failure involved their ruin.

During this evening Charles IX., weary with the day’s hunting, looked to be forty years old.  He had reached the last stages of the malady of which he died, the symptoms of which were such that many reflecting persons were justified in thinking that he was poisoned.  According to de Thou (the Tacitus of the Valois) the surgeons found suspicious spots—­ex causa incognita reperti livores—­on his body.  Moreover, his funeral was even more neglected than that of Francois II.  The body was conducted from Saint-Lazare to Saint-Denis by Brantome and a few archers of the guard under command of the Comte de Solern.  This circumstances, coupled with the supposed hatred of the mother to the son, may or may not give color to de Thou’s supposition, but it proves how little affection Catherine felt for any of her children,—­a want of feeling which may be explained by her implicit faith in the predictions of judicial astrology.  This woman was unable to feel affection for the instruments which were destined to fail her.  Henri III. was the last king under whom her reign of power was to last; that was the sole consideration of her heart and mind.