Page:The Practice of Diplomacy - Callières - Whyte - 1919.djvu/73

have them in his hands night and day if he desires perfection in his own art. In a simple and modest manner the despatches of this Cardinal reveal the force and the address which were his great merit, and which, in spite of the antiquity of his style, still give keen pleasure to those who have a taste for good diplomatic writing. One may see thus how by his ability alone, without the assistance of noble birth, title, or other character than that of agent of his queen, Louise de Vaudemont, widow of King Henry III., he was able gradually to conduct the high enterprise of reconciling King Henry the Great with the Holy See after the most famous ambassadors of the time had failed in it; with what dexterity he escaped all the pitfalls laid for him by the Roman Court, and all the traps which the House of Austria, then at the height of its power, devised for his undoing. The reader will marvel, as he turns each page, how nothing escaped his penetrating eye. He will find even the least movements of Pope Clement VIII. and his nephew the Cardinal recorded with care. He will see how Monseigneur d'Ossat profited by everything, how he is firm as a rock when necessity demands, supple as a willow at another moment, and how he possessed the supreme art of making every man offer him as a gift that which it was his chief design to secure.