The assassination of the Duke in December was the necessary result of the barricades in May; and accordingly that assassination was arranged with an artistic precision of which the world had hardly suspected the Valois to be capable, and which Philip himself might have envied.
The story of the murders of Blois--the destruction of Guise and his brother the Cardinal, and the subsequent imprisonment of the Archbishop of Lyons, the Cardinal Bourbon, and the Prince de Joinville, now, through the death of his father, become the young Duke of Guise--all these events are too familiar in the realms of history, song, romance, and painting, to require more than this slight allusion here.
Never had an assassination been more technically successful; yet its results were not commensurate with the monarch's hopes.

The deed which he had thought premature in May was already too late in December.

His mother denounced his cruelty now, as she had, six months before, execrated his cowardice.

And the old Queen, seeing that her game was played out--that the cards had all gone against her--that her son was doomed, and her own influence dissolved in air, felt that there was nothing left for her but to die.

In a week she was dead, and men spoke no more of Catharine de' Medici, and thought no more of her than if--in the words of a splenetic contemporary--"she had been a dead she-goat." Paris howled with rage when it learned the murders of Blois, and the sixteen quarters became more furious than ever against the Valois.