all depended upon the life of one man! And when in those days did any body, especially an Italian man or woman, allow a single life to stand between them and their desire? Coligny must be got rid of; then the queen-mother would recover her influence; then there would be an end of this perplexing Flemish business; and with Henry of Navarre, the head of the Huguenot party, married to her daughter, there would be no cause to fear a revival of internal disturbances. But these political negotiations and discussions were not permitted to delay the preparations for the marriage that was to unite Catholics and Reformers into one homogeneous people. On the 6th of May Joan left Blois, and arrived in Paris eight or nine days after, such being the rate at which royalty traveled a distance that now does not require as many hours. She took up her abode in a house belonging to Jean Guillart, Bishop of Chartres, one of the prelates who had been excommunicated in 1563 for his liberal opinions. The removal to Paris was fatal to her: within a month she sickened and died (9th June, 1572),[543] not without suspicion of poison administered by means of a pair of gloves sent to her by René, the queen-mother’s perfumer. There is not the slightest ground for the suspicion: the season was unhealthy. “People are dying here very fast,” wrote the dowager Princess of Condé, “for which reason I do not send for my children.”[544] What wonder, then, that the Queen of Navarre, who was ill at ease, should pine and sicken in the hot ill-cleansed streets of Paris.[545] De Thou says she died of an abscess brought on by excessive fatigue. Although suffering acutely, she bore the pain without a word of impatience or complaint. When she saw her women weeping round her bed: “Do not cry,” she said; “God is calling me to that better life, which I have always longed for.” Her great anxiety was about her children--her son Henry and her daughter the amiable Catherine: “I trust that God will be a father and protector to them, as he has been to me in my sorest trials. To his providence I commit them, feeling sure he will provide for them.” With these words she died, at the age of forty-four, leaving a name still mentioned with fond respect among the mountains of Bearn. There were some who openly exulted in her death, calling it “a judgment from heaven upon Jezebel the Huguenot queen.” But hers was a character which, though deficient in some of the milder features of a woman’s nature, could despise such uncharitable judgment. Voltaire describes her as Grande par des vertus qui manquaient à son fils,