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Three or four days after that visit, as I was walking with the Abbe Gama towards the Villa Medicis, he told me deliberately that there would be an execution during the night in the Piazza di Spagna. "What kind of execution?"
This they immediately did; and owing to the absence of the Prince de Condé and the Comte de Soissons, both of whom aspired to the high office about to be filled by Marie de Medicis, without the slightest opposition or disturbance.
Henry of Navarre, whom the artifice and calumny of a Medicis had done their best to separate and estrange from his king and brother-in-law during life, was now the only attendant upon his last moments the only friend to press his dying hand and close his eyes.
He sounded Crillon, the leader of the "Forty-five," on the subject, but this noble soldier refused to have anything to do with it, offering, however, to challenge him to single combat. De Loignac was less scrupulous, and we know the result; the Duc de Guise and his brother the cardinal were both murdered. Ten days after this event, Catherine de Medicis, the queen-mother, died, regretted by none.
For the wedding festivities attendant upon the marriage of Francesco de Medicis and Bianca Capella in 1579 Gualterotti arranged a grand tournée in the interior court of the Pitti Palace at Florence. This entertainment was of a nature similar to that of 1539 above described. It was composed of mythologic episodes spectacularly treated.
Her eye was fixed upon France. While Catharine of Medicis was all-powerful, while her edict secured toleration for the Huguenots on one side of the sea, Mary knew that it was impossible to refuse toleration on the other. But with the first movement of the Duke of Guise fiercer hopes revived.
The two are still in apposition, not yet in opposition, but the discerning may perchance read a prophecy in the salient features of the priest. The Man of Power of the beginning of the twentieth century demands a subtler analysis, presents an enigma to which the immortal portraits of forgotten Medicis and Capets give no clew.
The dead and damned Medicis who cruelly tyrannized over Florence and were her curse for over two hundred years, are salted away in a circle of costly vaults, and in their midst the Holy Sepulchre was to have been set up. The expedition sent to Jerusalem to seize it got into trouble and could not accomplish the burglary, and so the centre of the mausoleum is vacant now.
You are in the hands of Italians of the countrymen and countrywomen of Catherine de Medicis; and everything is to be apprehended from people who know so well how to work out their ends by poison." "Is it come to this?" gasped the young King as he sank back upon his chair. "Am I to die mocked as I have lived? A sovereign without a will, a king without a throne, a monarch without a crown?
Nevertheless, the Maréchal d'Ancre and his adherents affected to treat the warlike demonstrations of the adverse party with contempt, and assured Marie de Medicis that all the efforts of the Prince must prove abortive while the King possessed a strong army and able generals to oppose the forces of the malcontents; and, in support of his assertion, the Ducs de Guise and d'Epernon alike offered their services to her Majesty.
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