Page:Margaret of Angoulême, Queen of Navarre (Robinson 1886).djvu/156

Rh me." Worn by disappointment and anxiety, she had become a nervous, delicate, and melancholy woman, hopelessly estranged from her frivolous husband.

Madame d’Étampes, who for so many years had taken her place and usurped her duties, was now too anxious on her own behalf to care to soothe the trouble of the King. Should Francis die, what would become of her who for so long, so wantonly, had provoked the anger and hate of the Dauphin and of his stately Diana? What lurid clouds would not cover her when that pale crescent moon had filled its orb? The pretty Huguenot Duchess was in a very fever of anxiety and suspicion. What was the melancholy of Francis to her own?

Nor were the children of the King of much avail. Henry was of the opposite faction; he looked sternly and coldly on the frivolities of his father. The Duke of Orleans, riotous, gallant, high-spirited, the favourite child of Francis, was of little use in so sorrowful a sick-chamber. Madelaine was dead. Studious Madame Marguerite was too young, too inexperienced to help. She lived, for the most, in the decorous Court of the Queen, apart from the dying licentious old King, the selfish, imperious mistress, the riotous young Duke of Orleans. And Catherine dei Medici, who had courted Francis in order to discover his secrets, had not the art to cure a distempered soul. The King was virtually alone in his melancholy and his suspicion.

Then the double war broke out with Charles V. and with Henry of England. Queen Leonor, never hardened to the constant war between her husband and her brother, fell ill of a nervous fever from grief and distraction; the two young princes went to the war; the Court was so pervaded by desolating anxiety, that