the
opposition. The civil wars were inaugurated.

Francois II died on December 5, 1560; Mary of Scots went back to her
native land, weeping bitterly, and the queen-mother assumed the regency,
as her second son, Charles IX, was then only ten years and six months of
age. He was not without good parts, he had an inclination for _les
belles lettres_, fostered in him by his preceptor, Amyot, who had
translated Plutarch, and one of his favorites was the poet, Pierre de
Ronsard. The mutual outrages and exasperations, the changing fortunes of
the incessant wars between Catholics and Huguenots, gradually led up to
the calamity of the Saint-Bartholomew; in 1567, five years before, the
young king was nearly captured by the chiefs of the Reformed religion,
escaping with difficulty to his capital and to his palace of the Louvre.
To cement the peace of Saint-Germain, signed in 1570, and which granted
such favorable terms to the Protestants that the Catholic party
protested fiercely, a marriage was arranged between the son of Jeanne
d'Albret, Queen of Navarre, Henri de Bearn, and the king's sister,
Marguerite, the Reine Margot of the chroniclers. The Queen of Navarre
and her son, followed by the Admiral Coligny and a host of the leaders
among the Huguenots, came to Paris; the protestations of friendship with
which they were received by the king inflamed still more the passions of
the partisans of the Guises, and the sudden death of Jeanne d'Albret,
attributed to poison, but probably caused by a pulmonary affection, only
served to increase the universal apprehension and suspicion.

The marriage was postponed, but celebrated a week later, on the 17th of
August, 1572, with great pomp; the bridegroom took up his lodgings in
the Louvre, but, five days later, Coligny, returning to his little hotel
in the Rue des Fosses-Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, was fired at by an
assassin named Maurevert in the pay of the Guises, receiving one ball in
the left arm and losing the index finger of his right hand by another.
The excessive grief and concern manifested by the king seems to have
disarmed his suspicions; but Catherine, aided by the leaders of the
Catholic party, was incessantly urging her son to seize the opportunity
thus within his grasp, and, by exterminating all the enemies of the true
religion, at once avert from France the horrors of a fourth civil war.
"The king resisted; his mother quoted to him the Italian proverb that
mildness is often c