M. Strozzi, who was fond of the said Pompadour, bethought him of employing his sister, Signora Clarice Strozzi, Comtesse de Tenda, whom the Queen of Spain loved from her earliest years, they having studied together. The said countess, who loved her brother, did not refuse him, but begged the Queen of Spain to intercede; who answered that she would do anything for her except that, because she dreaded to irritate and annoy the queen, her mother, and displease her. But the countess continuing to importune her, she employed a third person who sounded the ford privately, telling the queen-mother that the queen, her daughter, would have asked this pardon to gratify the said countess had she not feared to displease her. To which the queen-mother replied that the thing must be wholly impossible to make her refuse it. On which the Queen of Spain made her little request, but still in fear; and suddenly it was granted. Such was the kindness of this princess, and her virtue in honouring and fearing the queen, her mother, she being herself so great. Alas! the Christian proverb did not hold good in her case, namely: “He that would live long years must love and honour and fear his father and mother;” for, in spite of doing all that, she died in the lovely and pleasant April of her days; for now, at the time I write, [1591] she would have been, had she lived, forty-six years old. Alas! that this fair sun disappeared so soon in a dark-some grave, when she might have lighted this fine world for twenty good years without even then being touched by age; for she was by nature and complexion fitted to keep her beauty long, and even had old age attacked her, her beauty was of a kind to be the stronger. Surely, if her death was hard to Spaniards, it was still more bitter to us Frenchmen, for as long as she lived France was never invaded by those quarrels which, since then, Spain has put upon us; so well did she know how to win and persuade the king, her husband, for our good and our peace; the which should make us ever mourn her.