The King, arriving like the whirlwind, turned everybody out of the closet in which the duke—but newly risen—received him in bed-gown and night-cap. Alone with his minister, Henry came abruptly to the matter.
"You have heard what is being said of me?" he burst out. He stood with his back to the window, a sturdy, erect, soldierly figure, a little above the middle height, dressed like a captain of fortune in jerkin and long boots of grey leather, and a grey hat with a wine-coloured ostrich plume. His countenance matched his raiment. Keeneyed, broad of brow, with a high-bridged, pendulous nose, red lips, a tuft of beard and a pair of grizzled, bristling moustachios, he looked half-hero, half-satyr; half-Captain, half-Polichinelle.
Sully, tall and broad, the incarnation of respectability and dignity, despite bed-gown and slippers and the nightcap covering his high, bald crown, made no presence of misunderstanding him.
"Of you and the Princesse de Conde, you mean, sire?" quoth he, and gravely he shook his head. "It is a matter that has filled me with apprehension, for I foresee from it far greater trouble than from any former attachment of yours."
"So they have convinced you, too, Grand-Master?" Henry's tone was almost sorrowful. "Yet I swear that all is greatly exaggerated. It is the work of that dog Concini. Ventre St. Gris! If he has no respect for me, at least he might consider how he slanders a child of such grace and wit and beauty, a lady of her high birth and noble lineage."
There was a dangerous quiver of emotion in his voice that was not missed by the keen ears of Sully. Henry moved from the window, and flung into a chair.
"Concini works to enrage the Queen against me, and to drive her to take violent resolutions which might give colour to their pernicious designs."
"Sire!" It was a cry of protest from Sully.
Henry laughed grimly at his minister's incredulity, and plucked forth the letter from Vaucelas.
"Read that."
Sully read, and, aghast at what the letter told him, ejaculated: "They must be mad!"
"Oh, no," said the King. "They are not mad. They are most wickedly sane, which is why their designs fill me with apprehension. What do you infer, Grand-Master, from such deliberate plots against resolutions from which they know that nothing can turn me while I have life?"
"What can I infer?" quoth Sully, aghast.
"In acting thus—in daring to act thus," the King expounded, "they proceed as if they knew that I can have but a short time to live."
"Sire!"
"What else? They plan events which cannot take place until I am dead."
Sully stared at his master for a long moment, in stupefied silence, his loyal Huguenot soul refusing to discount by flattery the truth that he perceived.
"Sire," he said at last, bowing his fine head, "you must take your measures."
"Ay, but against whom? Who are these that Vaucelas says he dare not name? Can you suggest another than..." He paused, shrinking in horror from completing the utterance of his thought. Then, with an abrupt gesture, he went on, "... than the Queen herself?"
Sully quietly placed the letter on the table, and sat down. He took his chin in his hand and looked squarely across at Henry.
"Sire, you have brought this upon yourself. You have exasperated her Majesty; you have driven her in despair to seek and act upon the councils of this scoundrel Concini. There never was an attachment of yours that did not beget trouble with the Queen, but never such trouble as I have been foreseeing from your attachment to the Princess of Conde. Sire, will you not consider where you stand?"
"They are lies, I tell you," Henry stormed. But Sully the uncompromising gravely shook his head. "At least," Henry amended, "they are gross exaggerations. Oh, I confess to you, my friend, that I am sick with love of her. Day and night I see nothing but her gracious image. I sigh and fret and fume like any callow lad of twenty. I suffer the tortures of the damned. And yet... and yet, I swear to you, Sully, that I will curb this passion though it kill me. I will stifle these fires, though they consume my soul to ashes. No harm shall come to her from me. No harm has come yet. I swear it. These stories that are put about are the inventions of Concini to set my wife against me. Do you know how far he and his wife have dared to go? They have persuaded the Queen to eat nothing that is not prepared in the kitchen they have set up for her in their own apartments. What can you conclude from that but that they suggest that I desire to poison her?"
"Why suffer it, sire?" quoth Sully gravely. "Send the pair packing back to Florence, and so be rid of them."
Henry rose in agitation. "I have a mind to. Ventre St. Gris! I have a mind to. Yes, it is the only thing. You can manage it, Sully. Disabuse her mind of her Suspicions regarding the Princess of Conde; make my peace with her; convince her of my sincerity, of my firm intention to have done with gallantry, so that she on her side will make me the sacrifice of banishing the Concinis. You will do this, my friend?"
It was no less than Sully had been expecting from past experience, and the task was one in which he was by now well-practiced; but the situation had never before been quite so difficult. He rose.
"Why, surely, sire," said he. "But her Majesty on her side may require something more to reconcile her to the sacrifice. She may reopen the question of her coronation so long and—in her view—so unreasonably postponed."
Henry's face grew overcast, his brows knit. "I have always had an instinct against it, as you know, Grand Master," said he, "and this instinct is strengthened by what that letter has taught me. If she will dare so much, having so little real power, what might she not do if..." He broke off, and fell to musing. "If she demands it we must yield, I suppose," he said at length. "But give her to understand that if I discover any more of her designs with Spain I shall be provoked to the last degree against her. And as an antidote to these machinations at Madrid you may publish my intention to uphold the claims of the German Princes in the matter of Cleves, and let all the world know that we are arming to that end."
He may have thought—as was long afterwards alleged—that the threat itself should be sufficient, for there was at that time no power in Europe that could have stood against his armies in the field.
On that they parted, with a final injunction from Sully that Henry should see the Princesse de Conde no more.
"I swear to you, Grand Master, that I will use restraint and respect the sacred tie I formed between my nephew and Charlotte solely so that I might impose silence upon my own passion."
And the good Sully writes in comment upon this: "I should have relied absolutely upon these assurances had I not known how easy it is for a heart tender and passionate as was his to deceive itself"—which is the most amiable conceivable way of saying that he attached not the slightest faith to the King's promise.
Nevertheless he went about the task of making the peace between the royal couple with all the skill and tact that experience had taught him; and he might have driven a good bargain on his master's behalf but for his master's own weakness in supporting him. Maria de' Medici would not hear of the banishment of the Concinis, to whom she was so deeply attached. She insisted with perfect justice that she was a bitterly injured woman, and refused to entertain any idea of reconciliation save with the condition that arrangements for her coronation as Queen of France—which was no more than her due—should be made at once, and that the King should give an undertaking not to make himself ridiculous any longer by his pursuit of the Princess of Conde. Of the matters contained in the letter of Vaucelas she denied all knowledge, nor would suffer any further inquisition.