diplomatist, “shunned to look a league or a confederation in the face, if there was any Protestant element in it, as if it had been the head of Medusa,” had formally forbidden the passage of troops northwards to the relief of the assailed power.  Savoy, after direful hesitations, had committed herself body and soul to the great enterprise.  Even the Pope, who feared the overshadowing personality of Henry, and was beginning to believe his house’s private interests more likely to flourish under the protection of the French than the Spanish king, was wavering in his fidelity to Spain and tempted by French promises:  If he should prove himself incapable of effecting a pause in the great crusade, it was doubtful on which side he would ultimately range himself; for it was at least certain that the new Catholic League, under the chieftainship of Maximilian of Bavaria, was resolved not to entangle its fortunes inextricably with those of the Austrian house.

The great enterprise, first unfolding itself with the episode of Cleve and Berg and whimsically surrounding itself with the fantastic idyl of the Princess of Conde, had attained vast and misty proportions in the brain of its originator.  Few political visions are better known in history than the “grand design” of Henry for rearranging the map of the world at the moment when, in the middle of May, he was about to draw his sword.  Spain reduced to the Mediterranean and the Pyrenees, but presented with both the Indies, with all America and the whole Orient in fee; the Empire taken from Austria and given to Bavaria; a constellation of States in Italy, with the Pope for president-king; throughout the rest of Christendom a certain number of republics, of kingdoms, of religions—­a great confederation of the world, in short—­with the most Christian king for its dictator and protector, and a great Amphictyonic council to regulate all disputes by solemn arbitration, and to make war in the future impossible, such in little was his great design.

Nothing could be more humane, more majestic, more elaborate, more utterly preposterous.  And all this gigantic fabric had passed away in an instant—­at one stroke of a broken table knife sharpened on a carriage wheel.

Most pitiful was the condition of France on the day after, and for years after, the murder of the King.  Not only was the kingdom for the, time being effaced from the roll of nations, so far as external relations were concerned, but it almost ceased to be a kingdom.  The ancient monarchy of Hugh Capet, of Saint-Louis, of Henry of France and Navarre, was transformed into a turbulent, self-seeking, quarrelsome, pillaging, pilfering democracy of grandees.  The Queen-Regent was tossed hither and thither at the sport of the winds and waves which shifted every hour in that tempestuous court.

No man pretended to think of the State.  Every man thought only of himself.  The royal exchequer was plundered with a celerity and cynical recklessness such as have been rarely seen in any age or country.  The millions so carefully hoarded by Sully, and exhibited so dramatically by that great minister to the enraptured eyes of his sovereign; that treasure in the Bastille on which Henry relied for payment of the armies with which he was to transform the world, all disappeared in a few weeks to feed the voracious maw of courtiers, paramours, and partisans!