at full length upon the pavement, where it was immediately pilfered of every article of value; among other things diamonds of great price, and notes of hand to a large amount were abstracted from the pockets of his vest.

"A few of his followers endeavoured to interpose; but in a second or two all was over, and they were warned by the bystanders instantly to sheath their swords, and to beware of opposing the orders of the King. They had scarcely had time to obey this bidding when Louis presented himself at the window of a closet joining the guard-room, to which, from its height, he was obliged to be lifted by M. d'Ornano; there, by the advice of those about him, the young King appeared with a smile upon his face; and as the members of the cabal raised a cry of Vive le Roi!' he shouted to his captain of the guard: I thank you, Vitry; now I am really a King. Then showing himself, sword in hand, successively at each window of the guard-room, he cried out to the soldiers who were posted beneath: To arms! comrades, to arms!'

"Meanwhile Vitry, by the direction of de Luynes, proceeded to the hall occupied by the body-guard of the Queen-mother, and demanded their weapons, which they refused to deliver up without an express order to that effect from their own officers; upon which the latter were commanded in the name of the King to withdraw their men, and to remain in the ante-chamber of their mistress. The royal guards then took possession of all the avenues of the Louvre; and horsemen were dispatched with instructions to traverse the streets of the capital, and to apprise the citizens of the death of Concini. A dense crowd soon collected in the court of the Louvre, and cries of Vive le Roi !' resounded on all sides.

"A murder had been committed, and the ovation was one which would only have befitted a victory. Louis XIII. had proclaimed himself a King; and the hand with which he grasped his sceptre was steeped in blood. Louis the Just-we append to his baptismal appellation that which was gravely conferred upon him on this occasion by both clergy and laity-stood, an undisguised assassin and a moral matricide, before the people who were about to be subjected to his rule."

"But it is now time that we should return to the Queen-mother. "Alarmed by the report of fire-arms within the boundary of the palace, Marie de Medicis, who had not yet completed her toilette, desired Caterina Salveggi to throw open one of the windows, and to demand the cause of so singular and unpardonable an infraction of the law. She was obeyed: and the Italian waitingwoman no sooner perceived de Vitry advancing beneath the apartments of her royal mistress than she inquired of him what had occurred.

The Maréchal d'Ancre has been shot,' was the abrupt reply. "Shot!' echoed Caterina; and by whom?'

6

"By myself; ' said de Vitry composedly; and by the command of the King.' "Madam exclaimed the terrified attendant, as she rushed to the side of the Queen-mother; M. le Maréchal has been killed by order of his Majesty.'

"Marie de Medicis started from her seat; her cheeks were blenched, her lips quivered, and she wrung her hands convulsively, as she gasped out: 'I have reigned seven years. I must now think only of a crown in heaven.'

"Her attendants, stupified with terror, rapidly gathered round her; and ere long she learnt that her guards had been disarmed, and replaced by those of the King. She listened vaguely to each successive report, and paced the room with rapid but uncertain steps. At length she exclaimed vehemently: I do not regret that my son should have taken the life of Concini, if he believed it necessary to the safety of his kingdom; but his distrust of myself in concealing such a project from my knowledge is more than I can bear.'

"When the first violence of her emotion had subsided she sank into a seat, and with clasped hands and drooping head, appeared to be absorbed in deep and bitter thought; for at intervals the blood mounted to her brow and burned there for a time; after which she again became as pale as ashes, and as motionless as a corpse. She was still in this attitude when one of her confidential servants imprudently approached her, and inquired how the melancholy event was to be communicated to the Maréchale d'Ancre? Perhaps,' he incautiously suggested, your Majesty will condescend to acquaint her with it yourself."

"Marie de Medicis suddenly raised her hand, swept back her dishevelled hair from her face, and fixing her flashing eyes upon the officious gentleman, passionately replied: 'I have other things to attend to at this moment. If no one can tell the maréchale that her husband has been killed, let them sing it to her. Let me never again hear the name of those people. I told them long ago that they would

do right to return to Italy. Yes ;' she continued, more particularly addressing the dowager-Duchess de Guise, the Princess de Conti, and the other ladies who were standing near her; they have at last accomplished my ruin: I foresaw it; I warned them; but they would not be convinced. I told Concini that he had no time to lose, but with his habitual self-sufficiency he declared repeatedly that the King became more courteous to him every day. I was not deceived, however; I charged him not to trust to appearances, for that Louis never said all he thought: he disregarded my words; and he has now involved me in his own destruction."

Perhaps the person in this tragedy with whom we sympathise the most, is Concini's wife, the Maréchale d'Ancre, to whose dreadful fate Marie de Medicis, absorbed in her own sorrows, was cruelly indifferent. Madame d'Ancre, formerly Leonora Galigaï, was tried and doomed by a packed tribunal to suffer death for treason and sorcery. Miss Pardoe thus relates the closing scenes of her life.

"Whatever might have been her faults while she continued the favourite of fortune, Leonora Galigaï was grand in her adversity; and one of her judges was so much overpowered by his conviction of her innocence, that on recollecting the pledge which he had given to de Luynes to decide upon her guilt, he fainted, and was carried from the court. When accused of treason against the state, the prisoner replied by reminding her accusers of her total estrangement from her husband during the last two years, throughout which period he had been allpowerful with the Queen-mother, and her own consequent loss of influence; and when questioned as to the nature of the sorcery by which she had so long governed her royal mistress, she answered that it was simply the magic exercised by a strong mind over a weak one. To the other charges she responded with equal composure and conclusiveness; and many among them were of so puerile a character that, despite the fearful position in which she was placed, she could not suppress a smile of mingled pity and amusement.

"She was foredoomed, however; and on the 8th of July the sentence was pronounced. It was in truth a frightful one! Both the husband and the wife were declared guilty of lèse-majesté divine and human; and she herself was condemned to lose her head, and to be afterwards burned; their house was to be levelled with the ground; their property, not only in France, but also all that they possessed at Rome and Florence, was to be confiscated to the crown; and their son deprived of his rank, and rendered incapable of holding any office in the kingdom. When this sentence was declared, the wretched woman, who had never anticipated a more severe fate than exile, exclaimed in a piteous voice: Oimè poveretta!' but shortly recovering herself, she resumed the same calm courage which she had previously evinced.

"It is painful to reflect upon the position which the marquise had filled, and to see her thus shaken and withered both in mind and body; abandoned by the protectress, to whom she had clung so long and so confidingly; widowed by violence; separated from her only surviving child: and compelled to drain her cup of bitterness to the very dregs. Not a pang was, however, voluntarily spared to her. She might, in consideration of her rank as the wife of a marshal of France, and out of respect for the Queen-mother, of whom she had not only been the foster-sister, but also the familiar friend, have been conveyed to the place of execution in a covered carriage, and thus have been in some degree screened from the public gaze; but no such delicacy was observed. The condemned cart, with its ghastly faggot for a seat, was her ordained conveyance; but her step did not falter as she ascended the vehicle which had been previously tenanted by the vilest and most degraded criminals. Never had there been seen so dense a crowd in the Place de Grève ; and as she glanced hurriedly around, unaware of the popular reaction of feeling, she cowered for an instant panic-struck, and murmured helplessly: Oh, what a multitude to gaze upon a miserable woman!'

"Not a word, not a gesture of vengeance or of hate, escaped, however, from the populace. Her deportment had been so dignified, her courage so great, her piety so perfect, that those who were once her bitterest enemies, looked on her through their

tears.

"Her head fell-her body was burned-and her ashes were scattered to the wind."

THE CASE OF M. LIBRI.

THE case of M. Libri has been before the public piece-meal : some know one fact, some another; but few have had an opportunity of comparing the different parts of this extraordinary procedure. We draw up a brief enumeration, for it can be little more, of the leading points of the persecution, and of the defence. But we shall neither frighten the general reader, nor exhaust our own limited space, by any of those bibliographical descriptions which the pieces of this controversy abound in.

William Libri, of a noble Tuscan family, first became known in 1820 by a mathematical paper. Shortly afterwards, at twenty years of age, he was made professor in the University of Pisa, his own alma mater. In 1824, he gained high reputation at Paris, while visiting that city, as well by mathematics as by scholarship, bibliographical attainments, and power of conversation. He was again on a visit at Paris during the Revolution of 1830: and on his return to Italy, the Tuscan Government, looking upon him as a liberal, desired him to leave the country. He returned to France, where he was welcomed, naturalized, and made a member of the Institute in 1833, with several professorial appointments. From 1835 to 1841, he published four volumes of his history of the mathematical sciences in Italy, a work in which the resources of the man of letters, the manuscript hunter, and the bibliographer, come in aid of the mathematician more largely than in any other sustained scientific history, of our century at least, perhaps of any. While thus engaged in science, M. Libri embarked in politics, aided the party of Louis Philippe by his writings, opposed the Jesuits both in their French and Italian schemes, and was more than once marked by opposite journals for a proper object of vengeance, as a monarchist, and as an Austrian traitor to the cause of Italy. He gained the particular enmity of the Ecole des Chartes, which opposed him in such a manner, that on his appointment as one commissioner to examine the departmental libraries, he is said to have refused to act, if one single élève of that school were appointed to act under commission. This, as we shall see, must be noted.

Some little time before the Revolution of 1848, rumours were set about that M. Libri (who was well-known as a book-buyer, and had sold a large collection at Paris, as well as a great number of manuscripts to Lord Ashburnham) was a systematic robber of the public libraries ; not a thief, not a filcher of this and the other volume, but a robber, who had taken to the amount of hundreds of thousands of francs. Anonymous rumours, conveyed to M. Boucly, the procureur du roi, produced a report from him to the garde des sceaux, stating the result of his inquiries. The existence of such a report, at or before the disturbance in 1848, became known to several, and among others, to M. Terrien, editor of the National, and therefore, at the crisis alluded to, one of the most powerful men in France. This man put into M. Libri's hands at the Institute, a note in which, after allusion to the report, he distinctly threatened popular vengeance. His own account of his own words is,-Epargnez à la société nouvelle des réactions qui lui répugnent; ne venez plus à l'Institut. M. Libri's account of it, supported by the affidavit of an Italian friend to whom he showed it in going home, is that after the last

clause was added, disparaissez, and that for des réactions, we must read un de ces actes de vindicte populaire. To us it seems that the two phrases mean much the same. M. Libri's friends recommended his immediate departure; and he came to England in March. M. Boucly's report was soon published in the Moniteur, and M. Libri immediately set himself to reply. By the aid of some of his papers, forwarded by a friend* immediately after his hasty flight (which papers we have seen, as we have all documents on which we rely, meaning all we quote and many more), he gave so complete a proof of the negative upon all the insinuations, that no more was heard of this document. He continued his defence in a letter to M. de Falloux. In the meanwhile, his books and other effects were seized at Paris, and a commission of experts, as they are called (whether the word be derived in this instance from expertus, or from expers, the reader must judge for himself), was named to examine them; it was selected from among the élèves of the Ecole des Chartes, with one exception: and some months afterwards, this one exception was cashiered, M. Libri affirms, for impartiality. These experts made their report in April 1850, and (June 22nd) M. Libri was condemned by default.

The act of accusation, which was immediately published in several different forms, is a curious document: it resembles a bad article written by a partisan in a strong party review. A large part of it consists in attacks upon M. Libri's presumed line of defence, and upon portions of M. Libri took his pamphlets: but we shall presently see more of it. several of the definite points and replied to them most triumphantly. But it was hardly necessary to make an immediate reply, point by point for the bibliographers, to whom the subject was familiar, and whose special habits were necessary to form a judgment on all the evidence, were convinced of M. Libri's innocence, both in and out of France; while the French Government took care, as far as possible, to prevent any defence being published or introduced into France, the only country in which defence was at all needed. In April last, however, the Revue des Deux Mondes ventured to insert an article on the act of accusation, by M. Mérimée: and the poignant wit of this masterly exposure stung very deep. The judges were immediately induced to commence proceedings against both author and editor; and the experts made a reply, and M. Mérimée a short rejoinder to it, in the next number. Sentence was passed (no jury being now allowed in such cases) on the 26th of May: the gérant was fined two hundred francs, and M. Mérimée one thousand francs, with fifteen days' imprisonment. The judges, in passing sentence, lay stress on M. Mérimée's description of the act of accusation as a romance drawn up for effect: and the stress thus laid is a remarkable testimony to the truth of the description, which those who read the document will not need.

And

This brief abstract will enable the reader to connect the remarks we shall now proceed to make on the several features of the case. first, as to the undoubted previous unpopularity of M. Libri. We have alluded to his politics: we must add that in science he would not be a Frenchman, but remained an Italian. One of his great objects was to place Italian discovery, which the French historians had not treated fairly, in its proper rank. This brought him into continual collision with

Some were forwarded to England; others, so soon as it was thought that direct communication was no longer safe, to M. Libri's mother at Florence.

M. Arago at the Institute and personal enmity was the consequence. Those who know French science, and how little it attends to history and the learning which aids history, will guess what a nuisance must have been the presence of an able scholar and a profound mathematician, with everything that the French ignore at his fingers' ends, carrying the fire of reason and the sword of reference into their most sacred haunts; and, worse still, the small shot of ridicule, against which few Frenchmen have any armour. When they were establishing showers of toads by secondhand citations from old authors, M. Libri went to the originals, and got them a shower of oxen upon the same evidence; maudit Italien ! At the same time we must do the French savans the justice to say that M. Libri is a very warm nationalist, and that we will by no means guarantee his having been always in the right. Neither can the insinuations about stealing books be traced to the Institute: we suspect that political animosity generated this slander, and a real belief in the minds of bad men that collectors always steal, and that the charge was therefore sure to be true.

Next, we shall take the presumption to be derived from previous conduct. Every one who becomes acquainted with M. Libri soon learns that the restoration of Italian fame is always in his thoughts; and that, though learned in the history of other science, his interest in collecting is that of a propagandist, who would gladly, at his own cost, if he could, furnish every large library with the means of verifying Italian history. We are to believe that this Italian enthusiast, of whom no one asserts that he ever either hoarded money or spent on himself any large portion of the handsome income which his French appointments gave him, robbed the French libraries of their Italian books, and tried to disperse them, for the mere acquisition of their price. For we are to note that M. Libri specially collected Italian books, and the thefts charged are mostly of that kind of literature. He offered his whole collection, books and manuscripts, as a present to the French nation, on condition that they should be kept together and called by his name; which was refused. The offer was made to M. Naudet, of the Royal Library: when difficulties arose as to the stipulation, M. Libri complained to M. Guizot, the most influential of the ministry in literature, then, and now, his firm friend, and, we need hardly add, a firm believer in his innocence. M. Guizot remembers the whole, and not only certified the fact to the editor of an English journal in 1849, but gave it in evidence to a commission sent from Paris to examine him, as we learn from his own handwriting now before us.

A year after this, the framers of the act of accusation inform us, that the offer never went further than an after-dinner conversation with an employé in the library, and suppress entirely the evidence of M. Guizot, while making an assertion which that evidence contradicts. This piece of glaring bad faith shows that the indictment, as we suppose we must call it, was drawn up by men who cared nothing for the character of their country abroad, and relied upon intimidation at home. Honesty being out of the question, and second-best policy only to be considered, this suppression was necessary; for who could believe that M. Libri, whose acuteness is admitted, would venture to place, under his own name, and in a library accessible to all, the fruits of a systematic abstraction from (among others) the very library in which the exposure was to be made. Further, persons employed by M. Libri to arrange his