Bassompierre understood perfectly the kind of bargain that was in Henry’s mind. As for the Prince de Conde, he appears to have been less acute, no doubt because his vision was dazzled by the prospect of a hundred thousand livres a year. So desperately poor was he that for half that sum he would have taken Lucifer’s own daughter to wife, without stopping to consider the disadvantages it might entail. The marriage was quietly celebrated at Chantilly in February of 1609. Trouble followed fast. Not only did Conde perceive at last precisely what was expected of him, and indignantly rebel against it, but the Queen, too, was carefully instructed in the matter by Concino Concini and his wife Leonora Galigai, the ambitious adventurers who had come from Florence in her train, and who saw in the King’s weakness their own opportunity. The scandal that ensued was appalling. Never before had the relations between Henry and his queen been strained so nearly to breaking-point. And then, whilst the trouble of Henry’s own making was growing about him until it threatened to overwhelm him, he received a letter from Vaucelas, his ambassador at Madrid, containing revelations that changed his annoyance into stark apprehension. When the last Duke of Cleves died a few months before, “leaving all the world his heirs”—to use Henry’s own phrase—the Emperor had stepped in, and over-riding the rights of certain German princes had bestowed the fief upon his own nephew, the Archduke Leopold. Now this was an arrangement that did not suit Henry’s policy at all, and being then—as the result of a wise husbanding of resources—the most powerful prince in Europe, Henry was not likely to submit tamely to arrangements that did not suit him. His instructions to Vaucelas were to keep open the difference between France and the House of Austria arising out of this matter of Cleves. All Europe knew that Henry desired to marry the Dauphin to the heiress of Lorraine, so that this State might one day be united with France; and it was partly to support this claim that he was now disposed to attach the German princes to his interests. Yet what Vaucelas told him in that letter was that certain agents at the court of Spain, chief among whom was the Florentine ambassador, acting upon instructions from certain members of the household of the Queen of France, and from others whom Vaucelas said he dared not mention, were intriguing to blast Henry’s designs against the house of Austria, and to bring him willy-nilly into a union with Spain. These agents had gone so far in their utter disregard of Henry’s own intentions as to propose to the Council of Madrid that the alliance should be cemented by a marriage between the Dauphin and the Infanta.