Distance lent enchantment to the view. Poland was in a wretched condition through the dissensions of the nobility. The Emperor was angry and talked of stopping the duke _en route_.[1589] Lithuania seceded and entered into an alliance with the duke of Prussia, the king of Sweden, and Russia, to overthrow the Polish government.[1590] The Hanseatic cities, too, like Dantzig, Riga, and Revel, were very dissatisfied, for it was open knowledge that Poland aspired to the control of their commerce.[1591] The Poles themselves soon discovered that their new king was a goose without a golden egg. For the French lawyers found an interpretation of the promise that the French would discharge the debts of the realm to the effect that the promise meant only those arising since the death of the late king. The Polish agents in Paris made wry faces at the finding, but so the agreement was registered by the Parlement of Paris on September 17, 1573.[1592] In the same month the duke of Anjou set out for his new kingdom, going via Nancy, Heidelberg, and Frankfurt to Cracow. Metz he avoided because the Emperor, still sullen and still smarting from the loss of the city twenty-one years before (1552), had commanded the imperial commissioners appointed to conduct him, to receive him in Metz as though it were a free city of the empire, which the French naturally refused to permit. Again the foolish affection of Catherine de Medici for one of her children,[1593] again her political fatuity, threw France far off from the course she should have followed. As before the massacre, so now that course was the path to Italy.[1594] Instead of narrowing the field of her ambition for her children and concentrating her power, not content with Poland for the duke of Anjou, she even dreamed of the Hapsburg crown for Charles IX,[1595] and that of England for Alençon. Schomberg’s missions in 1572-73 to Germany[1596] were not merely to dispose the German princes in favor of France’s projected enterprise in the Netherlands, but also to persuade them, especially the electors of Cologne and the Palatinate, in favor of the French King’s imperial ambition. France’s policy in Poland[1597] and her policy in Germany were two parts of one grand design and in a large sense had to stand or fall together. Peace with the Huguenots was an essential element in the forwarding of this project, especially with the Protestant German princes, as Schomberg pointed out.[1598] But there were two great obstacles in the way of advance—German resentment because of the massacre of St. Bartholomew[1599] and the counter-diplomacy of Spain.[1600] The Guisard-Spanish party at home naturally exerted itself to thwart the prosecution of these designs.[1601] Morvilliers warned Charles IX that their continuance would involve France in a war with Spain.[1602] CHAPTER XVII THE LAST DAYS OF CHARLES IX. THE CONSPIRACY OF THE POLITIQUES