When the butchery was over, and the headless bodies were floating in the river or strung up on the branches of the trees or piled in heaps about the castle, Catherine retired. She commanded that the remains of the chief conspirators should be hung in chains from the iron balustrades of the stone balcony which protects the windows of the royal gallery and which still remains intact, on the north front of the castle, towards the river. The remainder were to be thrown into the Loire. This stone balcony borders now, as then, the whole length of the state apartments towards the river. A fall of some hundred feet down a sheer mass of grey rock on which the castle stands makes the head dizzy. Over this precipice the headless bodies dangled, swaying to and fro in the March wind, a hideous and revolting sight. No one could pass through any of the apartments of the castle without beholding it. But despised humanity in the shape of the murdered Huguenots asserted its claim on the attention of the Court, and the stench of these bodies hung to the balcony, and of those strung up on the trees, and the rotting corpses that dammed up the river, soon became so overwhelming, that even Catherine herself was forced to retreat, and accompany her son and the young Queen to Chenonceau. The shock and excitement were, however, too much for the sickly Francis. Rapidly he pined and died; no physician was found who could cure a nameless malady. Mary Stuart, a widow at eighteen, passionate and romantic, clung fondly to that “pleasant land” where she had spent such happy days with the gracious Francis. She had been created Duchesse de Touraine at her marriage, and craved earnestly to be allowed to enjoy that apanage rather than be banished to reign in a barren land, which she dreaded like a living tomb. But her ambitious uncles, the Duc de Guise and the Cardinal de Lorraine, who were to her as parents, obstinately insisted on her departure for Scotland. So she sailed from Calais; and, from the deck of the ship that bore her across the seas, as the shores of France--which she was never more to see--gradually faded from her view, she sang to her lute that plaintive song, so identified with her memory:-- “Adieu, oh plaisant pays! Adieu! oh ma patrie, La plus chérie, qui a nourri Ma Belle enfance,--Adieu!” CHAPTER XVI. THE ASTROLOGER’S CHAMBER.