Thus died, at the age of thirty-eight, this pious and illustrious magistrate. “His execution,” says Mézeray, “inspired many persons with the conviction that the belief professed by so good and so enlightened a man, could not be evil;”[26] and Florimond de Rémond, then a student, avows that every one in the colleges was moved to tears, that they pleaded his cause after his death, and that this execution did more harm than a hundred ministers could have done with all their preaching. The year following, the Chancellor Olivétan pronounced the name of Anne Dubourg with despair upon his death-bed; and on the approach of the Cardinal de Lorraine, he said to him: “Ah! Cardinal, thou hast caused the damnation of us all.” In the midst of these persecutions, the affairs of the nation were daily becoming more critical. The new king, Francis II., was hardly six years old. Feeble in body and mind, his person, according to the energetic expression of an old historian, was exposed to the first occupant. Catherine de Medicis, the Guises, Châtillons, Bourbons, the Constable Anne de Montmorency, all worked to their own advantage this impotent fiction of the royalty of a child, and mingled with the religious discussions, the quarrels of their political ambition. We shall only speak of that which is immediately connected with our subject. Catherine de Medicis, who had now been in France six-and-twenty years, had brought from the country of Machiavelli the art of dissimulation, for which she had found such ample opportunity of exercise during the long humiliations, to which she had been subjected under the reign of the female favourites of Henry II. Artful and vindictive, licentious without having even the excuse of passion, ambitious of power, as much from the love of intrigue as from the pride of command, she had, nevertheless, abilities of a high order, which, directed to the pursuit of a good object, might have accomplished great designs; but having no longer either faith or moral feeling, and constantly engaged in ruining the authority of others in order to consolidate her own, she by turns embraced and deserted all parties alike. No wife and mother of our kings, Isabeau de Bavière excepted, has done so much injury to France as this Italian.[27] The Guises, even more than Catherine de Medicis, were during forty years the real leaders of the (Roman) Catholic party in France, and without them, as Mézeray remarks, the new religion would perhaps have become dominant. This family, which was a younger branch of that of the dukes of Lorraine, had only established itself in France since the reign of Louis XII. Claude de Lorraine came hither in 1513, to seek his fortune, _with a valet and a walking-stick_. He had by Antoinette de Bourbon six sons and four daughters, who all succeeded in raising themselves to offices of consideration.