And now the ides of May had come—­but not gone.

In the midst of all the military preparations with which Paris had been resounding, the arrangements for the Queen’s coronation had been simultaneously going forward.  Partly to give check in advance to the intrigues which would probably at a later date be made by Conde, supported by the power of Spain, to invalidate the legitimacy of the Dauphin, but more especially perhaps to further and to conceal what the faithful Sully called the “damnable artifices” of the Queen’s intimate councillors—­sinister designs too dark to be even whispered at that epoch, and of which history, during the lapse of more than two centuries and a half, has scarcely dared to speak above its breath—­it was deemed all important that the coronation should take place.

A certain astrologer, Thomassin by name, was said to have bidden the King to beware the middle of the next month of May.  Henry had tweaked the soothsayer by the beard and made him dance twice or thrice about the room.  To the Duc de Vendome expressing great anxiety in regard to Thomassin, Henry replied, “The astrologer is an old fool, and you are a young fool.”  A certain prophetess called Pasithea had informed the Queen that the King could not survive his fifty-seventh year.  She was much in the confidence of Mary de’ Medici, who had insisted this year on her returning to Paris.  Henry, who was ever chafing and struggling to escape the invisible and dangerous net which he felt closing about him, and who connected the sorceress with all whom he most loathed among the intimate associates of the Queen, swore a mighty oath that she should not show her face again at court.  “My heart presages that some signal disaster will befall me on this coronation.  Concini and his wife are urging the Queen obstinately to send for this fanatic.  If she should come, there is no doubt that my wife and I shall squabble well about her.  If I discover more about these private plots of hers with Spain, I shall be in a mighty passion.”  And the King then assured the faithful minister of his conviction that all the jealousy affected by the Queen in regard to the Princess of Conde was but a veil to cover dark designs.  It was necessary in the opinion of those who governed her, the vile Concini and his wife, that there should be some apparent and flagrant cause of quarrel.  The public were to receive payment in these pretexts for want of better coin.  Henry complained that even Sully and all the world besides attributed to jealousy that which was really the effect of a most refined malice.

And the minister sometimes pauses in the midst of these revelations made in his old age, and with self-imposed and shuddering silence intimates that there are things he could tell which are too odious and dreadful to be breathed.

Henry had an invincible repugnance to that coronation on which the Queen had set her heart.  Nothing could be more pathetic than the isolated position in which he found himself, standing thus as he did on the threshold of a mighty undertaking in which he was the central figure, an object for the world to gaze upon with palpitating interest.  At his hearth in the Louvre were no household gods.  Danger lurked behind every tapestry in that magnificent old palace.  A nameless dread dogged his footsteps through those resounding corridors.