conflicting interests, left her after the first year, being recalled
to Italy by the death of Clement VII. Catherine's conduct, when we
remember that she was scarcely fifteen years old, was a model of
prudence. She attached herself closely to the king, her father-in-law;
she left him as little as she could, following him on horseback both
in hunting and in war. Her idolatry for Francois I. saved the house of
the Medici from all suspicion when the dauphin was poisoned. Catherine
was then, and so was her husband, at the headquarters of the king in
Provence; for Charles V. had speedily invaded France and the late
scene of the marriage festivities had become the theatre of a cruel
war.

At the moment when Charles V. was put to flight, leaving the bones of
his army in Provence, the dauphin was returning to Lyon by the Rhone.
He stopped to sleep at Tournon, and, by way of pastime, practised some
violent physical exercises,--which were nearly all the education his
brother and he, in consequence of their detention as hostages, had
ever received. The prince had the imprudence--it being the month of
August, and the weather very hot--to ask for a glass of water, which
Montecuculi, as his cup-bearer, gave to him, with ice in it. The
dauphin died almost immediately. Francois I. adored his son. The
dauphin was, according to all accounts, a charming young man. His
father, in despair, gave the utmost publicity to the proceedings
against Montecuculi, which he placed in the hands of the most able
magistrates of that day. The count, after heroically enduring the
first tortures without confessing anything, finally made admissions by
which he implicated Charles V. and his two generals, Antonio di Leyva
and Ferdinando di Gonzago. No affair was ever more solemnly debated.
Here is what the king did, in the words of an ocular witness:--