queen and the Bourbons,--whereas, in reality, Catherine was playing them
all one against another.

The queen had become, as the reader will perceive, extremely powerful
in a very short time. The spirit of discussion and controversy which now
sprang up was singularly favorable to her position. The Catholics and
the Reformers were equally pleased to exhibit their brilliancy one after
another in this tournament of words; for that is what it actually was,
and no more. It is extraordinary that historians have mistaken one of
the wiliest schemes of the great queen for uncertainty and hesitation!
Catherine never went more directly to her own ends than in just such
schemes which appeared to thwart them. The king of Navarre, quite
incapable of understanding her motives, fell into her plan in all
sincerity, and despatched Chaudieu to Calvin, as we have seen. The
minister had risked his life to be secretly in Orleans and watch events;
for he was, while there, in hourly peril of being discovered and hung as
a man under sentence of banishment.

According to the then fashion of travelling, Chaudieu could not reach
Geneva before the month of February, and the negotiations were not
likely to be concluded before the end of March; consequently the
assembly could certainly not take place before the month of May,
1561. Catherine, meantime, intended to amuse the court and the various
conflicting interests by the coronation of the king, and the ceremonies
of his first "lit de justice," at which l'Hopital and de Thou recorded
the letters-patent by which Charles IX. confided the administration to
his mother in common with the present lieutenant-general of the kingdom,
Antoine de Navarre, the weakest prince of those days.

Is it not a strange spectacle this of the great kingdom of France
waiting in suspense for the "yes" or "no" of a French burgher, hitherto
an obscure man, living for many years past in Geneva? The transalpine
pope held in check by the pontiff of Geneva! The two Lorrain princes,
lately all-powerful, now paralyzed by the momentary coalition of the
queen-mother and the first prince of the blood with Calvin! Is not
this, I say, one of the most instructive lessons ever given to kings
by history,--a lesson which should teach them to study men, to seek out
genius, and employ it, as did Louis XIV., wherever God has placed it?

Calvin, whose name was not Calvin but Cauvin, was the son of a cooper
at Noyon in Picardy. The region of h