Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III Catherine de' Medici and her escadron -volant?Adroitness with which the Queen employs the charms of her maids-of-honour to seduce the Huguenot chiefs?The King of Navarre and la belle Rouet?Policy of Catherine after the Peace of Amboise?She determines to compromise Condi with his foreign allies and the French Protestants, by encouraging his taste for sensual pleasures?And selects for his subjugation her maid-of-honour and kinswoman Isabelle de Limeuil?Description of this siren?Her admirers? Her mercenary character?Beginning of her liaison with the prince?Conde and Elizabeth of England?Mile, de Limeuil, inspired by Catherine, seeks to persuade Conde to break with Elizabeth?Mission of d'Alluye to England ?Conde is induced to take up arms against his late allies?Siege and surrender of Le Havre. THE life of the Court, which naturally possessed a great attraction for a man of Conde's temperament, was full of snares and pitfalls. It was not for the mere pleasure of beholding their pretty faces that Catherine recruited her entourage from the most beautiful young girls in France. During the lifetime of her husband, in the days before she had been called upon to play a political r6le, Catherine had been the most austere of queens, guarding the reputation of her ladies as jealously as she did her own, and visiting with her severe displeasure the slightest breach of decorum on their part . But when she found herself a widow, struggling in an endless web of plot and falsehood to protect her children's heritage; beset on one side by the Catholics, on the other, by the Huguenots; often driven to her wits' end to devise means to prevent the royal authority being submerged amid the strife of contending parties, her austerity gave way before political exigencies, and, reco...