with the succour you mean to send us (and but little is necessary!), I would gladly undertake, on my life—mere woman though I be—to keep him from passing."
The Emperor did not pass. His armies starved and thirsted on the devastated frontier. Victory attended the arms of the French; but Death, the faithful retainer, fought now, as ever, upon the Emperor's side. The war shrank into insignificance beside a blow that, not without suspicion of treason, changed the future of France.
For the young Dauphin, Francis, the idol of his father, the heir of the kingdom, suddenly died. He was sailing down the Rhone to join the King in the camp at Valence. He broke his journey at Lyons, and there, one day, being overheated from a game of tennis, he sent his page to draw him a cup of water from a well. It is probable the young prince succumbed to a violent pleurisy. But, when he died that night in extremity of torture, all France declared that Montecuculi, the Dauphin's cup-bearer, had smeared some Spanish poison of the Emperor's upon the edges of the cup.
More than mourning and anger were to come of this event. The Dauphin, Francis, had been, in mind as well as in body, singularly his father's child. He was of Francis's party: gay, chivalric, gallant, perhaps unstable, liberal, easy. But Henry, the second son, was now the heir. The unusual character of this youth of eighteen made him already remarkable at Court. Henry was taciturn, sardonic, melancholy.
"He seems all nerve," says Matteo Dandolo; "he is so strong and tall. But he is dark, pallid, livid—even green—and it is said he was never seen to laugh
