A silken web of palace-politics, palace-diplomacy, palace-revolutions enveloped him. Schemes and counter-schemes, stratagems and conspiracies, assassinations and poisonings; all the state machinery which worked so exquisitely in fair ladies’ chambers, to spread havoc and desolation over a kingdom, were displayed before his eyes. Now campaigning with one royal brother against Huguenots, now fighting with another on their side, now solicited by the queen-mother to attempt the life of her son, now implored by Henry III to assassinate his brother, the Bearnese, as fresh antagonisms, affinities, combinations, were developed, detected, neutralized almost daily, became rapidly an adept in Medician state-chemistry. Charles IX in his grave, Henry III on the throne, Alençon in the Huguenot camp--Henry at last made his escape. The brief war and peace of Mercœur succeeded, and the king of Navarre formally abjured the Catholic creed. The parties were now sharply defined. Guise mounted upon the League, Henry astride upon the Reformation, were prepared to do battle to the death. The temporary “war of the amorous” was followed by the peace of Fleix. Four years of peace again--four fat years of wantonness and riot preceding fourteen hungry, famine-stricken years of bloodiest civil war. The voluptuousness and infamy of the Louvre were almost paralleled in vice, if not in splendor, by the miniature court at Pau. Henry’s Spartan grandfather would scarcely have approved the courses of the youth whose education he had commenced on so simple a scale. For Margaret of Valois, hating her husband, and living in most undisguised and promiscuous infidelity to him, had profited by her mother’s lessons. A seraglio of maids of honor ministered to Henry’s pleasures, and were carefully instructed that the peace and war of the kingdom were playthings in their hands. While at Paris royalty was hopelessly sinking in a poisonous marsh, there was danger that even the hardy nature of the Bearnese would be mortally enervated by the atmosphere in which he lived.