content with this? Have we anything further to wish for, if we do not desire to offend God, Who is warning us by such evident signs of our entire ruin? I have been all the afternoon with my wife imploring her to retire; I have been on my knees before her, seeking to persuade her the more effectively. But she is more determined than ever to remain, and reproaches me with wishing to abandon the Queen, who has given us, or enabled us to acquire, so many honours and so much wealth. Monsieur, I see myself so irremediably ruined that, if I were not, as everyone knows, under such great obligations to my wife, I would leave her and go where neither the nobles nor the people of France would come to seek me. Judge, Monsieur, whether I have not reason for my distress, and whether, apart from the loss of my daughter, the approach of this second disaster ought not to torment me doubly.’ “I said what I could to console him and divert him from these thoughts,” concludes Bassompierre, “and withdrew. I wish to show from this discourse how men, especially those whom Fortune has elevated, have inspirations and forebodings of disaster, without possessing the resolution to prevent or escape it.” Concini’s despondency passed as quickly as it had come, and scarcely was his daughter in her grave, than he was once more flaunting his wealth and his power in the faces of Court and town. No Prince of the Blood had ever gone abroad attended by a more numerous or more gorgeous retinue; his pride was so great that he scarcely deigned to notice the existence of any but the great nobles; while, as for the Ministers, he regarded them as his servants, and not finding them sufficiently docile, planned to replace them by creatures of his own. Marie de’ Medici herself began to grow weary of the presumption of the husband and the ill-humour of the wife, who appears to have been a martyr to neuralgia, and often treated her mistress in a manner against which even the Queen-Mother’s sluggish nature rebelled. At length, she suggested the advisability of the precious pair returning to Florence with the spoil which they had amassed; but Concini wished to tempt Fortune to the end.