Poissy

But, you know, so those are the terms I agreed to.

I traveled over to Paris and drove to this little prison outside Paris that's a town called Poissy.

And if I can describe it, you've got this really old building that you could walk around it and you wouldn't know it was a prison.

It used to be a convent, you know, centuries ago.

Leaders of the Catholic and Protestant churches in France met on Catherine's instructions to find a compromise between their religious convictions.

Despite Catherine's optimism, the Colloquy of Poissy, as this meeting was called, failed, and on the 13th of October 1561, the meeting dissolved itself without her permission.

Politics had blinded Catherine to reality.

She had failed to understand the religious divides which were impeding the functioning of political power.

The boy king and his mother.

Louis was born on the twenty-fifth of April in the year twelve fourteen at Poissy, a town near Paris.

He would sometimes sign himself Louis of Poissy in later life because it was the place where he had been baptized, and he counted his baptism as the most important thing that had ever happened to him.

That tells you something about the kind of king he would become.

Most rulers measure their lives by their crownings.

And I have to set the scene a little bit.

There's this interesting little prison outside Paris in a little town called Poissy.

The building used to be a monastery, or sorry, convent.

It was built back in the medieval time.

The lawyer asked Carlos and he said, sure, come over, come to Paris.

You know, he's in this prison outside Paris in a town called Poissy.

And so I was excited to get that reply.

It turns out, though, the French are very reluctant.