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The Spaniards, who had the strongest interest in the catastrophe, were supposed to have been the instigators; but the fear of implicating other powers, and plunging France into greater evils than those from which their hero had rescued them, deterred not only statesmen, but even the judges on Ravaillac's trial, from pressing for the names of accomplices.
This visit of the "Passauer" was again due to that noxious mixture, religion plus politics. The Union of Protestant German Princes had been broken, and Ravaillac's dagger had killed Henri Quatre, spoiling his plans towards helping Protestantism, in which plans the French King had also included Bohemia.
But time has justified its wisdom, and modern statesmanship has been able to devise no wiser plan than that conceived in the mind of this enlightened king nearly three centuries ago. How much France lost by Ravaillac's dagger can only be surmised, and when Henry, fatally stricken , was carried dying into the Louvre, a cry of grief arose from Catholic and Protestant alike throughout the kingdom.
Florentine Marie, with her carnation cheeks and opulent shoulders the Roman-nosed Bearnais, with his pointed beard and stiff ruff. Mon Dieu, how the world has changed since Ravaillac's knife snapped that valiant life! And you have never seen Paris? You look about you with wide-open eyes, and take this crowd, this ceiling, those candlebra for splendour."
Henri of Navarre, hero of romance and probably the greatest King who ever sat on the throne of France, had a heart as weak in love as it was stout in war. To his last day he was a veritable coward before the battery of bright eyes; and before Ravaillac's dagger brought his career to a tragic end one May day in the year 1610 he had counted his mistresses to as many as the years he had lived.
To punish Ravaillac's attack on the life of the French King, long ago, they tried ingenious devices. They broke him on the wheel. They tortured him slowly. Finally they poured melted lead into his stomach through his navel. It was a hard death. But they did not punish Ravaillac as severely as Bresci is to be punished. The minutes, the hours, the weeks, months and years will drag along.
Ravaillac murders a good king; Ravaillac's son enables his father to escape punishment, or conveys poison to his father to enable him to avoid torture by suicide. What is the inference as to the son's disposition in either case?
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