their dangers but my death. Ah! accursed coronation! Thou wilt be the cause of my death.” “Jesus! Sir,” cried Sully, “what fancy of yours is this? If it continue, I am of opinion that you should break off this anointment and coronation, and expedition and war; if you please to give me orders, it shall soon be done.” “Yes, break off the coronation,” said the king: “let me hear no more about it; I shall have my mind at rest from divers fancies which certain warnings have put into it. To bide nothing from you, I have been told that I was to be killed at the first grand ceremony I should undertake, and that I should die in a carriage.” “You never told me that, sir; and so have I often been astounded to see you cry out when in a carriage, as if you had dreaded this petty peril, after having so many times seen you amidst cannon-balls, musketry, lance-thrusts, pike-thrusts, and sword-thrusts; without being a bit afraid. Since your mind is so exercised thereby, if I were you, I would go away to-morrow, let the coronation take place without you, or put it off to another time, and not enter Paris for a long while, or in a carriage. If you please, I will send word to Notre-Dame and St. Denis to stop everything and to withdraw the workmen.” “I am very much inclined,” said the king; “ but what will my wife say? For she hath gotten this coronation marvellously into her head.” “She may say what she likes; but I cannot think that, when she knows your opinion about it, she will persist any longer.” Whatever Sully might say, Mary de’ Medici “took infinite offence at the king for his alarms: the matter was disputed for three days, with high words on all sides, and at last the laborers were sent back to work again.” Henry, in spite of his presentiments, made no change in his plans; he did not go away; he did not defer the queen’s coronation; on the contrary, he had it proclaimed on the 12th of May, 1610, that she would be crowned next day, the 13th, at St. Denis, and that on Sunday, the 16th, she would make her entry into Paris. On Friday, the 14th, he had an idea of going to the Arsenal to see Sully, who was ill; we have the account of this visit and of the king’s assassination given by Malherbe, at that time attached to the service of Henry IV., in a letter written on the 19th of May, from the reports of eye-witnesses, and it is here reproduced, word for word. [Illustration: The Arsenal in the Reign of Henry IV.----143]