Roche-Blanche; Or, the Hunters of the Pyrences (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAP. III. vhen the friends arrived in the capital, they found the court just removing to the pure air of Blois, by order of the king's physicians. Certain outward indications of a corrupt state of the bodily humours were fast increasing upon the face and person of the indolent Francis; and although these were not said to threaten life, the Guises were too much interested in the preservation of one under whose name they ruled, not to take the most active measures for the restoration of his health. The same circumstance stimulated the queen-mother to greater activity and hazard in the prosecution of her secret object. The death of Francis might cause a revolution in the minds of many of the Catholic confederates, and unsettle the purposes of the Hugonot ones, placing her wholly at the mercy of the young queen and her family. If Francis were to leave his consort in a condition which promised an heir to his crown (and the Guises caused this idea to be circulated), Catherine de Mediciswoutd at once become a cypher. The mother of the future sovereign, ami the kindred of that mother, would naturally preponderate in the state, both before and after its birth; and although it was just possible that one of the Bourbons might be forced upon the triumvirate by the authority of the people at large, there was no such prospect for the dowager queen. Jt became her best policy, therefore, to quicken the exertions and secure the fidelity of Adhemar de Bourbon; and as bis hopes of the legitimacy must infallibly fail, were the king to die under the cir to forward her own views by opening to him some fresh ground of hope. On his return from England she saw him as usual, in private; and after listening to all he had to relate of his unsuspected interview with the English queen, she scrupled ...