Durward' and 'Anne of Geierstein.'

Scott, however, willfully carved history to suit the purposes of his
story; and in these days we have come to feel that a story must earn
a certain amount of credibility by being in keeping with established
facts, even if striking events have to be sacrificed, and that the order
of time must be preserved. In Shakespeare's days, or even in Scott's,
it might have been possible to bring Henry III. and his _mignons_ to due
punishment within the limits of a tale beginning with the Massacre of
St. Bartholomew; but in 1868 the broad outlines of tragedy must be given
up to keep within the bounds of historical verity.

How far this has been done, critics better read than myself must decide.
I have endeavoured to speak fairly, to the best of my ability, of
such classes of persons as fell in with the course of the narrative,
according to such lights as the memoirs of the time afford. The Convent
is scarcely a CLASS portrait, but the condition of it seems to be
justified by hints in the Port Royal memoirs, respecting Maubuisson and
others which Mere Angelique reformed. The intolerance of the ladies
at Montauban is described in Madame Duplessis-Mornay's life; and if
Berenger's education and opinions are looked on as not sufficiently
alien from Roman Catholicism, a reference to Froude's 'History of Queen
Elizabeth' will show both that the customs of the country clergy, and
likewise that a broad distinction was made by the better informed among
the French between Calvinism and Protestantism or Lutheranism, in which
they included Anglicanism. The minister Gardon I do not consider as
representing his class. He is a POSSIBILITY modified to serve the
purposes of the story.

Into historical matters, however, I have only entered so far as my
story became involved with them. And here I have to apologize for a
few blunders, detected too late for alteration even in the volumes. Sir
Francis Walsingham was a young rising statesman in 1572, instead of the
elderly sage he is represented; his daughter Frances was a mere infant,
and Sir Philip Sidney was not knighted till much later. For the rest,
I have tried to show the scenes that shaped themselves before me as
carefully as I could; though of course they must not be a presentiment
of the times themselves, but of my notion of them.

C. M. Yonge

November 14th, 1868

THE CHAPLET OF PEARLS

or

THE WHITE AND BLACK RIBAUMONT

CHAPTER I. T