“Affe d’Iddio! how we have fooled him!”

“Much good may it do him; let him make what he can of it!” said Cosmo.  “We have given him a helping hand,—­whether the queen pays it back to us or not.”

Some days after this scene, which struck the king’s mistress as forcibly as it did the king, Marie suddenly exclaimed, in one of those moments when the soul seems, as it were, disengaged from the body in the plenitude of happiness:—­

“Charles, I understand Lorenzo Ruggiero; but did you observe that Cosmo said nothing?”

“True,” said the king, struck by that sudden light.  “After all, there was as much falsehood as truth in what they said.  Those Italians are as supple as the silk they weave.”

This suspicion explains the rancor which the king showed against Cosmo when the trial of La Mole and Coconnas took place a few weeks later.  Finding him one of the agents of that conspiracy, he thought the Italians had tricked him; for it was proved that his mother’s astrologer was not exclusively concerned with stars, the powder of projection, and the primitive atom.  Lorenzo had by that time left the kingdom.

In spite of the incredulity which most persons show in these matters, the events which followed the scene we have narrated confirmed the predictions of the Ruggieri.

The king died within three months.

Charles de Gondi followed Charles IX. to the grave, as had been foretold to him jestingly by his brother the Marechal de Retz, a friend of the Ruggieri, who believed in their predictions.

Marie Touchet married Charles de Balzac, Marquis d’Entragues, the governor of Orleans, by whom she had two daughters.  The most celebrated of these daughters, the half-sister of the Comte d’Auvergne, was the mistress of Henri IV., and it was she who endeavored, at the time of Biron’s conspiracy, to put her brother on the throne of France by driving out the Bourbons.

The Comte d’Auvergne, who became the Duc d’Angouleme, lived into the reign of Louis XIV.  He coined money on his estates and altered the inscriptions; but Louis XIV. let him do as he pleased, out of respect for the blood of the Valois.

Cosmo Ruggiero lived till the middle of the reign of Louis XIII.; he witnessed the fall of the house of the Medici in France, also that of the Concini.  History has taken pains to record that he died an atheist, that is, a materialist.

The Marquise d’Entragues was over eighty when she died.

The famous Comte de Saint-Germain, who made so much noise under Louis XIV., was a pupil of Lorenzo and Cosmo Ruggiero.  This celebrated alchemist lived to be one hundred and thirty years old,—­an age which some biographers give to Marion de Lorme.  He must have heard from the Ruggieri the various incidents of the Saint-Bartholomew and of the reigns of the Valois kings, which he afterwards recounted in the first person singular, as though he had played a part in them.  The Comte de Saint-Germain was the last of the alchemists who knew how to clearly explain their science; but he left no writings.  The cabalistic doctrine presented in this Study is that taught by this mysterious personage.