It Was Within The
Walls Of Amboise That His Widow, Anne Of Brittany,
Already In Mourning For Three Children, Two
Of whom
we have seen commemorated in sepulchral marble at
Tours, spent the first violence of that grief which was
Presently dispelled by a union with her husband's
cousin and successor, Louis XII. Amboise was a fre-
quent resort of the French Court during the sixteenth
century; it was here that the young Mary Stuart spent
sundry hours of her first marriage. The wars of re-
ligion have left here the ineffaceable stain which they
left wherever they passed. An imaginative visitor at
Amboise to-day may fancy that the traces of blood
are mixed with the red rust on the crossed iron bars
of the grim-looking balcony, to which the heads of
the Huguenots executed on the discovery of the con-
spiracy of La Renaudie are rumored to have been
suspended. There was room on the stout balustrade -
an admirable piece of work - for a ghastly array. The
same rumor represents Catherine de' Medici and the
young queen as watching from this balcony the _noyades_
of the captured Huguenots in the Loire. The facts of
history are bad enough; the fictions are, if possible,
worse; but there is little doubt that the future Queen
of Scots learnt the first lessons of life at a horrible
school. If in subsequent years she was a prodigy of
innocence and virtue, it was not the fault of her whilom ???
mother-in-law, of her uncles of the house of Guise, or
of the examples presented to her either at the
windows of the castle of Amboise or in its more pri-
vate recesses.
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