th, the uprightness, the
forbearance, the purity that they evinced could indeed be wanting in
the zeal that made them acceptable. Then came the frightful morning when
carnage reigned in every street, and the men who had been treated as
favourite boon companions were hunted down like wild beasts in every
street. He had endeavoured to save life, but would have speedily been
slaughtered himself except for his soutane; and in all good faith he
had hurried to the Louvre, to inform royalty of the horrors that, as he
thought, a fanatic passion was causing the populace to commit.

He found the palace become shambles--the King himself, wrought up to
frenzy, firing on the fugitives. And the next day, while his brain still
seemed frozen with horror, he was called on to join in the procession of
thanksgiving for the King's deliverance from a dangerous plot. Surely,
if the plot were genuine, he thought, the procession should have
savoured of penance and humiliation rather than of barbarous exultation!
Yet these might be only the individual crimes of the Queen-mother, and
of the Guises seeking to mask themselves under the semblance of
zeal; and the infallible head of the visible Church would disown the
slaughter, and cast it from the Church with loathing as a blood-stained
garment. Behold, Rome was full of rejoicing, and sent sanction and
commendation of the pious zeal of the King! Had the voice of Holy Church
become indeed as the voice of the bloodhound? Was this indeed her call?

The young man, whose life from infancy had been marked out for the
service of the Church--so destined by his parents as securing a wealthy
provision for a younger son, but educated by his good tutor with more
real sense of his obligations--felt the question in its full import.
He was under no vows; he had, indeed, received the tonsure, but was
otherwise unpledged, and he was bent on proving all things. The gaieties
in which he had at first mingled had become abhorrent to him, and he
studied with the earnestness of a newly-awakened mind in search of true
light. The very face of study and inquiry, in one of such a family as
that of his brother the Duke de Mericour, was enough to excite suspicion
of Huguenot inclinations. The elder brother tried to quash the folly of
the younger, by insisting on his sharing the debaucheries which, whether
as priest or monk, or simply as Christian man, it would be his duty to
abjure; and at length, by way of bringing things to