The Duchess de Montpensier, sister of the slaughtered duke, had made no secret of her intentions to have public revenge for the deed privately committed, whereby she had lost a brother. There was precaution enough taken that she should not approach the royal army or the king’s quarters; but a woman and a priest rendered all precautions futile. The somewhat gay duchess was on unusually intimate terms with a young monk, named Jacques Clement. This good Brother was a fanatic zealot for his church, and a rather too ardent admirer of the duchess, who turned both sentiments to her own especial purpose. She whispered in his ears a promise, to secure the fulfilment of which, he received with furious haste, the knife which was placed in his hands by the handsomest woman in France. It is said that knife is still preserved, a precious treasure, at Rome. However this may be, on the 1st of August, 1589, the young Brother, with a weapon hid in the folds of his monkish gaberdine, and with a letter in his hand, sought and obtained access to the king. He went straightforward to his butcher’s work, and had scarcely passed beneath the roof of the royal tent before he had buried the steel deep in the monarch’s bosom. He turned to fly with hot haste to the lady from whom he had received his commission; but a dozen swords and pikes thrust life out of him ere he had made three steps in the direction of his promised recompence. She who had engaged herself to pay for the crime cared for neither victim. She screamed indeed, but it was with a hysteric joy that threatened to slay her, and which was only allayed by the thought that the last King of the Valois race did not know that he had died by a dagger directed by a sister of Guise. In testimony of her exultation she distributed green scarfs, the color of Lorraine, to the people of Paris. She brought up from the provinces the mother of Clement, to whom was accorded the distinction of a triumphal entry. Priests and people worshipped the mother of the assassin as she passed wonderingly on her way; and they blasphemously saluted her with the chanted words, “Blessed be the womb that bare him, and the paps that gave him suck.” She was led to the seat of honor at the table of Guise, and Rome sheltered the infamy of the assassin, and revealed its own, by pronouncing his work to be a god-like act. By authority of the Vatican, medals were struck in memory and honor of the dead; but the Huguenots who read thereon the murderer’s profession and name--_Frère Jacques Clement_--ingeniously discovered therein the anagrammatic interpretation “_C’est l’enfer qui m’a crée_”--“It is hell that created me.”