The little village of Saint Cloud which is half-hidden in the Forest of Rouvray, was sacked and burned by the English after the battle of Poitiers, and then built up anew and occupied by the French monarchs in the reign of Charles VI. It was he who built the first _chateau de plaisance_ here in which the royal family might live near Paris and yet amid a sylvan environment. After this came the country-house of the Archbishops of Paris that Henri II, when he tired of it, tore down and erected a villa in the pseudo-Italian manner of the day, and built a fourteen-arch stone bridge across the Seine, which was a wonder of its time. The banker Gondi, after huddling close to royalty, turned over an establishment which he had built to Catherine de Medici, who made use of it whenever she wished to give a country fete or garden party. By this time the whole aspect of Saint Cloud was royal. It was within this house that the unhappy, and equally unpopular, Henri III was cut down by the three-bladed knife of the monk Jacques Clement. The incident is worth recounting briefly here because of the rapidity with which history was made by a mere fanatical knife-thrust. With the death of Henri III came the extinction of the House of Valois. As the king sat in the long gallery of the palace playing at cards, on August 1, 1589, his cloak hanging over his shoulder, a little cap with a flower stuck in it perched over one ear, and suspended from his neck by a broad blue ribbon a basketful of puppies, an astrologer by the name of Osman was introduced to amuse the royal party. "They tell me you draw horoscopes," remarked the king. "Sire, I will tell yours, if you will, but the heavens are unpropitious." * * * * * "Just over Meudon is a star which shines very brightly," continued the astrologer, "it is that of Henri de Navarre. But look, your Majesty, another star burns brilliantly for a moment and then disappears, mayhap it is your own." "If ever a man had a voice hoarse with blood it is that astrologer," said the king. "Away with him." "If the Valois Henri doesn't die before the setting of another sun, I'll never cast horoscope more," said the astrologer as he was hustled across the courtyard and out into the highroad. As he left, a man in a monk's garb begged to be admitted to the king's presence. It was Jacques Clement, the murderous monk, a wily Dominican, bent on a mission which had for its object the extinction of the Valois race. While the king was reading a letter which the monk had presented the latter stabbed him deep in the stomach. Swooning, the king had just time to cry out: "_Ha! le mechant moine: Il m'a tue, qu'on le tue._" The murderer in turn was struck down forthwith and his body, thrown from the windows of the palace, was _ecartele_ by four white horses, which is the neat French way of saying "drawn and quartered."