“Within the last three days, the King has endeavoured to persuade the Queen to request her Highness the Infanta to send the princess (de Condé) for her coronation. The Queen, through the King’s confessor (Père Cotton), has begged to be excused, observing that it did not seem to her to be becoming to appear as a third party and risk the indignity of a refusal from the Infanta. The King fell into a violent rage, and declared that the Queen should not be crowned, and that he would have nothing done to displease him. The Queen wept and was much distressed, both at this and at the ardour with which the King is pursuing one of her ladies.” Henri himself pretended to be entirely engrossed by his passion. “I am so worn out by these pangs,” he wrote to Préaulx, “that I am nothing but skin and bone. Everything disgusts me. I avoid company, and if, to observe the usages of society, I allow myself to be drawn into some assemblies, my wretchedness is completed.” Fortunately for the fame of Henri IV., greatly as his mind was disturbed and his judgment distracted by this miserable infatuation, it is now generally admitted that the affair had little influence on the course of events. The war upon which he was about to enter was the outcome of twelve long years of persevering negotiations and carefully-prepared alliances, and if he had never set eyes upon the Princesse de Condé, the final result would have been the same. “The King and his Ministers,” remarks Henri’s latest English biographer, Mr. P. F. Willert, “used the large forces assembled for quite a different purpose as a bugbear to frighten the Archdukes. But, when they refused to purchase security by a compliance inconsistent with their honour, it was not on Brussels that the French armies prepared to march. On the contrary, four days before his death (10 May, 1610), the King in the most friendly terms asked the Archduke Albert’s permission to lead his army across his territory to the assistance of his German allies: a permission granted by the Archduke, notwithstanding the opposition of Spinola and of the Spanish party in his Council.”[164] Nevertheless, almost up to the very last, there were many who still believed that, if the Princesse de Condé were given up, war might be averted. Among these was Henri IV.’s Jesuit confessor, Père Cotton, who, in an interview with Pecquius, informed him that, at the previous Easter, “the King was so sincerely desirous of securing his salvation that he had readily forgotten his affection for the princess; but that all his passion had been rekindled by the perusal of the letters which she addressed to him.”[165]