Despite all these appearances of merit, Sciarra d'Alvimar formed no scheme for his own advancement amid the constant intriguing at the court of the Regent; at all events, any that he may have dreamed of came to nothing. He confessed afterward, in the strictest privacy, that he had aspired to make himself agreeable to no less a personage than Marie de Médicis herself, and to replace his own master and patron, Maréchal d'Ancre, in that queen's good graces. But the _balorda_, as Leonora Galigai called her, paid no attention to the humble Spaniard, and saw in him only a paltry adventurer--a subaltern without future prospects. Did she even notice Monsieur d'Alvimar's real or feigned passion? That is something that history does not divulge and that D'Alvimar himself never knew. It is not an unreasonable supposition that he would have been capable of pleasing the Regent by his wit and the charms of his person, had not her thoughts been occupied by Concini. The favorite was of even lower origin, and was not half so intelligent as he. But D'Alvimar had within himself an obstacle to his attainment of the exalted fortune enjoyed by the successful courtiers of the day--an obstacle which his ambition could not overcome. He was a bigoted Catholic, and he had all the faults of the intolerant Catholics of the Spain of Philip II. Suspicious, restless, vindictive, implacable, he had abundance of faith nevertheless; but faith without love and without light, faith falsified by the passions and hatreds of a political system which identified itself with religion, "to the great displeasure of the merciful and indulgent God, whose kingdom is not so much of this world as of the other;" that is to say, if we apprehend aright the thought of the contemporary author to whom we look for information from time to time, the God whose conquests are supposed to extend through the moral world by charity, and not through the material world by the use of violence. It is impossible to say that France would not have been subjected in some degree to the régime of the Inquisition, in the event that Monsieur d'Alvimar had obtained possession of the Regent's heart and mind; but such was not the case, and Concini, whose sole crime was that he was not noble enough by birth to be entitled to rob and pillage as freely as a genuine great nobleman of those days, remained until his tragic death the arbiter of the Regents uncertain and venal policy. After the murder of the favorite, D'Alvimar, who had compromised himself seriously in his service in the affair of the _Paris serjean_,[1] was compelled to disappear to avoid being involved in the prosecution of Leonora.