Incidents at the Court and in Paris after the assassination of Henri IV--Meeting between Bassompierre and Sully--Marie de’ Medici declared Regent--Her difficult position--Return of Condé--Greed and arrogance of the grandees--Quarrel between the Comte de Soissons and the Duc de Guise--Grievance of _Monsieur le Comte_ against Bassompierre--He persuades Madame d’Entragues to endeavour to compel Bassompierre to marry her daughter, Marie--Proceedings instituted against that gentleman--Announcement of the “Spanish marriages”--Magnificent fêtes in the Place-Royale--Intrigues at the Court--The Princes and Concini in power--Assassination of the Baron de Luz by the Chevalier de Guise--Marie de’ Medici and the Princes--Conversation of the Regent with Bassompierre--Bassompierre reconciles the Guises with the Queen-Mother--The Chevalier de Guise kills the son of the Baron de Luz in a duel--The Princes, on the advice of Concini, return from Court. On that fatal day, when the knife of Ravaillac changed the destinies of France and of Europe, Louis XIII, the successor of the murdered King, was not yet nine years old. The fear of troubles within the realm and of complications without exacted the immediate institution of a regency, and Villeroy and the Chancellor, Brulart de Sillery, exhorted Marie de’ Medici, who was lying upon her bed prostrated with grief, to act “as man and as King.” The great nobles, out of pity or the desire to assert their own importance, were zealous in the Queen’s cause; and some who had scarcely been on bowing terms with each other for years were seen to embrace and vow to die together sword in hand if the necessity should arise. D’Épernon, Colonel-General of the French infantry, caused the approaches to the Louvre and the Pont-Neuf to be occupied by the French Guards; Guise, with part of a force of some 300 horse which he and Bassompierre had mustered, proceeded to the Hôtel de Ville to obtain from the Corporation a formal recognition of the new King and Regent; while Bassompierre, with the remainder, paraded the streets “to appease tumults and seditions.” Sully alone showed himself undecided, feeble and timorous. At the news of the King’s assassination, ill though he was, he had mounted his horse and set out for the Louvre, accompanied by some forty of his guards and attendants. Near the Place Saint-Jean he met Bassompierre and his cavalcade, the sight of whom appears to have filled him with misgivings. “He began,” writes Bassompierre, “to say to us in lachrymose tones: ‘Gentlemen, if the service which you have vowed to the King, whom, to our great misfortune, we have just lost, is also imprinted in your souls, as it ought to be in those of all good Frenchmen, swear now at once to preserve the same fidelity to the King his son and successor, and that you will employ your blood and your life to avenge his death.’