Within a few days you will all be moved to Amboise. The duke has
been studying the position from this terrace and decides that Blois is
not a propitious spot for his secret schemes. What can he want
better?" added Chiverni, pointing to the precipices which surrounded
the chateau. "There is no place in the world where the court is more
secure from attack than it is here."
"Abdicate or reign," said Albert in a low voice to the queen, who
stood motionless and thoughtful.
A terrible expression of inward rage passed over the fine ivory face
of Catherine de' Medici, who was not yet forty years old, though she
had lived for twenty-six years at the court of France,--without power,
she, who from the moment of her arrival intended to play a leading
part! Then, in her native language, the language of Dante, these
terrible words came slowly from her lips:--
"Nothing so long as that son lives!--His little wife bewitches him,"
she added after a pause.
Catherine's exclamation was inspired by a prophecy which had been made
to her a few days earlier at the chateau de Chaumont on the opposite
bank of the river; where she had been taken by Ruggieri, her
astrologer, to obtain information as to the lives of her four children
from a celebrated female seer, secretly brought there by Nostradamus
(chief among the physicians of that great sixteenth century) who
practised, like the Ruggieri, the Cardans, Paracelsus, and others, the
occult sciences.
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