nots on to a fatal security. A few months
later, at Avignon, Catharine caused an ordinance to be published in the
king's name, which Cardinal Santa Croce characterized as an excellent one.
It excluded Protestants from holding judicial seats. Catharine told the
nuncio that her counsellors had been desirous of extending the same
prohibition to all other charges under government, but that she had
deterred them. It would have driven the Huguenots to desperation, and
might have occasioned disturbances. "We shall labor, however," she said,
"to exclude them little by little from all their offices." At the same
time she expressed her joy that everything was succeeding so well, and
privately assured the nuncio "that people were much deceived in her."[354]

And yet such are the paradoxes of history, especially in this age of
surprises, that, at the very moment the king was depriving his own
Protestant subjects of their rights, he was negotiating in behalf of the
Protestant subjects of his neighbors! The king would not leave Avignon--so
wrote the English envoy--without reconciling the inhabitants of the Comtat
Venaissin and the principality of Orange, whom diversity of religion had
brought into collision. And, by the articles of pacification which the
ambassador enclosed, the king was seen "to have had a care for others
also, having provided a certain liberty of religion even to the Pope's own
subjects, which he had much difficulty in obtaining."[355]

[Sidenote: Marshal Montmorency checks the Parisian mob.]

[Sidenote: His encounter with Cardinal Lorraine.]

While the queen mother, under cover of her son's authority, followed the
new policy of opposition to the Huguenots upon which she had now entered,
an incident occurred at Paris showing that even the Roman Catholics were
not unanimous in their support of the Guises and their plan of
exterminating heresy. The governor of the metropolis was Marshal
Montmorency, the most worthy of all the constable's sons. He had
vigorously exerted himself ever since the king's departure to protect the
Huguenots in accordance with the provisions of the treaty. A Protestant
woman, who during the war had been hung in effigy for "huguenoterie," but
had returned from her flight since the conclusion of peace, died and was
secretly buried by friends, one Sunday night, in the "Cimetiere des
Innocents." The next morning a rabble, such as only Paris could afford,
collected with the intention of disinter