These are the last words that are to be found of his in contemporary accounts; a few hours afterwards he was smitten to death in his carriage, brought back to the Louvre, laid out on his bed; one of his councillors of state, M. de Vie, seated on the same bed, had put to his mouth his cross of the order, and directed his thoughts to God; Milon, his chief physician, was at the bedside, weeping: his surgeons wanted to dress his wounds; a sigh died away on his lips, and “It is all over,” said the physician; “he is gone.” Guise and Bassompierre went out to look after what was passing out of doors; they met “M. de Sully with some forty horse, who, when he came up to us, said to us in tearful wise, ‘Gentlemen, if the service ye vowed to the king is impressed upon your souls as deeply as it ought to be with all good Frenchmen, swear all of ye this moment to keep towards the king his son and successor the same allegiance that ye showed him, and to spend your lives and your blood in avenging his death?’ ‘Sir,’ said Bassompierre, ‘it is for us to cause this oath to be taken by others; we have no need to be exhorted thereto;’ Sully turned his eyes upon him, he adds, and then went and shut himself up in the Bastille, sending out to ‘seize and carry off all the bread that could be found in the market and at the bakers’. He also despatched a message in haste to M. de Rohan, his son-in-law, bidding him face about with six thousand Swiss, whose colonel-general he was, and march on Paris.” Henry IV. being dead, it was for France and for the kingship that Sully felt alarm and was taking his precautions. [Illustration: The Louvre----145] CHAPTER XXXVII.----REGENCY OF MARY DE’ MEDICI. (1610-1617.)