It was all most romantic, and the lady, when she learnt of it,
shed tears of mingled joy and rage, and wrote him impassioned
letters in which she addressed him as her knight, and implored
him, as he loved her, to come and deliver her from the detestable
tyrant who held her in thrall. Those perfervid appeals completed
his undoing, drove him mad, and blinded him to everything--even
to the fact that his wife, too, was shedding tears, and that
these were of rage undiluted by any more tender emotion.
He began by sending Praslin to require the Archduke to order the
Prince of Conde to leave his dominions. And when the Archduke
declined with dignity to be guilty of any such breach of the law
of nations, Henry dispatched Cccuvres secretly to Brussels to
carry off thence the princess. But Maria de' Medici was on the
alert, anti frustrated the design by sending a warning of what
was intended to the Marquis Spinola, as a result of which the
Prince de Conde and his wife were housed for greater security in
the Archduke's own palace.
Checkmated at all points, yet goaded further by the letters which
he continued to receive from that most foolish of princesses,
Henry took the wild decision that to obtain her he would invade
the Low Countries as the first step in the execution of that
design of a war with Spain which hitherto had been little more
than a presence.
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