The great enterprise, first unfolding itself with the episode of Cleve
and Berg and whimsically surrounding itself with the fantastic idyl of
the Princess of Conde, had attained vast and misty proportions in the
brain of its originator. Few political visions are better known in
history than the "grand design" of Henry for rearranging the map of the
world at the moment when, in the middle of May, he was about to draw his
sword. Spain reduced to the Mediterranean and the Pyrenees, but
presented with both the Indies, with all America and the whole Orient in
fee; the Empire taken from Austria and given to Bavaria; a constellation
of States in Italy, with the Pope for president-king; throughout the rest
of Christendom a certain number of republics, of kingdoms, of religions--
a great confederation of the world, in short--with the most Christian
king for its dictator and protector, and a great Amphictyonic council to
regulate all disputes by solemn arbitration, and to make war in the
future impossible, such in little was his great design.

Nothing could be more humane, more majestic, more elaborate, more
utterly preposterous. And all this gigantic fabric had passed away
in an instant--at one stroke of a broken table knife sharpened on a
carriage wheel.

Most pitiful was the condition of France on the day after, and for years
after, the murder of the King. Not only was the kingdom for the, time
being effaced from the roll of nations, so far as external relations were
concerned, but it almost ceased to be a kingdom. The ancient monarchy
of Hugh Capet, of Saint-Louis, of Henry of France and Navarre, was
transformed into a turbulent, self-seeking, quarrelsome, pillaging,
pilfering democracy of grandees. The Queen-Regent was tossed hither and
thither at the sport of the winds and waves which shifted every hour in
that tempestuous court.