First he asked if the marriage would be happy, and says:--"Having in my library made the figure of the heavens, I found that the lord of the ascendant is joined to the lord of the seventh house, which is for the woman of a trine aspect, from whence I have immediately concluded, according to the opinion of Ptolemy, Haly, Zael, Messahala, and many other sovereign astrologers, that they will love one another intensely all their lives." In point of fact they always detested each other. Again, "as to length of life, I have prepared another figure, and have found that Jupiter and Venus are joined to the sun with fortification, and that they will approach a hundred years;" after all Henri IV. died before he was sixty. "Our good King of Navarre will have by his most noble and virtuous Queen many children; since, after I had prepared another figure of heaven, I found the ascendant and its lord, together with the moon, all joined to the lord of the fifth house, called that of children, which will be pretty numerous, on account of Jupiter and also of Venus;" and yet they had no children! "Jupiter and Venus are found domiciled on the aquatic signs, and since these two planets are found concordant with the lord of the ascendant, all this proves that the children will be upright and good, and that they will love their father and mother, without doing them any injury, nor being the cause of their destruction, as is seen in the fruit of the nut, which breaks, opens, and destroys the stock from which it took its birth. The children will live long, they will be good Christians, and with their father will make themselves so benign and favourable towards those of our religion, that at last they will be as beloved as any man of our period, and there will be no more wars among the French, as there would have been but for the present marriage. God grant us grace that so long as we are in this transitory life we may see no other king but Charles IX., the present King of France." And yet these words were written in the year of the massacre of St. Bartholomew's day! and the marriage was broken off, and Henri IV. married to Marie de Medici. So much for the astrological predictions! The aspect in which astrology was looked upon by the better minds even when it was flourishing may be illustrated by two quotations we may make, from Shakespeare and Voltaire.