he Duke of Guise. Lastly the vanquished, when they
quitted the town, were to leave it intact, having no power to pull down
houses, unpave streets, throw up earth, displace a single stone, pull
out a single nail. The conqueror's precautions were as deliberate as
his audacity had been sudden. On the 9th of January, 1558, after a
week's siege, Calais, which had been in the hands of the English for two
hundred and ten years, once more became a French town, in spite of the
inscription which was engraved on one of its gates, and which may be
turned into the following distich:--

"A siege of Calais may seem good
When lead and iron swim like wood."

The joy was so much the greater in that it was accompanied by great
surprise: save a few members of the king's council, nobody expected this
conquest. "I certainly thought that you must be occupied in preparing
for some great exploit, and that you wished to wait until you could
apprise me of the execution rather than the design," wrote Marshal de
Brissac to the Duke of Guise, on the 22d of January, from Italy.
Foreigners were not less surprised than the French themselves; they had
supposed that France would remain for a long while under the effects of
the reverse experienced at Saint-Quentin. "The loss of Calais," said
Pope Paul IV., "will be the only dowry that the Queen of England will
obtain from her marriage with Philip. For France such a conquest is
preferable to that of half the kingdom of England." When Mary Tudor,
already seriously ill, heard the news, she exclaimed from her deathbed,
on the 20th of January, "If my heart is opened, there will be found
graven upon it the word Calais." And when the Grand Prior of France, on
repairing to the court of his sister, Mary of Lorraine, in Scotland, went
to visit Queen Elizabeth, who had succeeded Mary Tudor, she, after she
had made him dance several times with her, said to him, "My dear prior, I
like you very much, but not your brother, who robbed me of my town of
Calais."

Guise was one of those who knew that it is as necessary to follow up a
success accomplished as to proceed noiselessly in the execution of a
sudden success. When he was master of Calais he moved rapidly upon the
neighboring fortresses of Guines and Ham; and he had them in his power
within a few days, notwithstanding a resistance more stout than he had
encountered at Calais. During the same time the Duke of Nevers,
encourage