considered to be one of the most beautiful women at the French Court;
but her spirit of intrigue rendered her a dangerous companion for a
youthful and neglected Queen, and her morals were unfortunately not
above suspicion.

[18] The Cross of Trahoir was a small irregularly shaped space,
surrounded by miserable hovels, with high pointed roofs, most of which
were in a state of dangerous dilapidation; the broken casements in every
instance replaced by rags or straw; the doors ill-hung and swinging upon
their rusty hinges, and the whole of the buildings lost in dirt and
wretchedness. The inhabitants of this filthy nook were of the lowest and
most depraved description, and no other tenants could indeed have been
found to make their dwelling there; as in addition to the squalor of the
buildings themselves, the deeply-sunk and humid soil, which in fact
formed an open sewer that drained the adjacent streets, supported
several permanent gibbets arranged in the form of a cross; while the
thoroughfares by which it was approached were foul and fetid lanes,
breathing nothing save disease and infection.

[19] Mézeray, Péréfixe, and Daniel say that it was the Due de Montbazon
whose arm warded off the blow.

[20] François Ravaillac was a native of Angoulême, the son of a lawyer,
and was about thirty-two years of age. He was a descendant through the
female line of Poltrot de Méré, the assassin of the Due de Guise. He had
been originally destined to follow the profession of his father, but the
loss of a lawsuit having reduced his parents to beggary, he took refuge
in the monastery of the Feuillants, where he entered upon his novitiate.
His weakness of intellect and extreme irritability caused him, however,
to be rejected by that community; and he returned to his native