LETTER VII

After this fatal event, which was as unfortunate for France as
for me, we went to Lyons to give the meeting to the King of Poland,
now Henri III. of France. The new King was as much governed by
Le Guast as ever, and had left this intriguing, mischievous man
behind in France to keep his party together. Through this man's
insinuations he had conceived the most confirmed jealousy of my
brother Alençon. He suspected that I was the bond that connected
the King my husband and my brother, and that, to dissolve their
union, it would be necessary to create a coolness between me and
my husband, and to work up a quarrel of rivalship betwixt them
both by means of Madame de Sauves, whom they both visited. This
abominable plot, which proved the source of so much disquietude
and unhappiness, as well to my brother as myself, was as artfully
conducted as it was wickedly designed.

Many have held that God has great personages more immediately
under his protection, and that minds of superior excellence have
bestowed on them a good genius, or secret intelligencer, to apprise
them of good, or warn them against evil. Of this number I might
reckon the Queen my mother, who has had frequent intimations
of the kind; particularly the very night before the tournament
which proved so fatal to the King my father, she dreamed that she
saw him wounded in the eye, as it really happened; upon which she
awoke, and begged him not to run a course that day, but content