believed that they were going, not to massacre, but to battle "against
enemies who menaced their faith and their liberty." The League,
according to this champion of the Church, M. V. de Chalambert, "was at
once legitimate in its principles, energetic and sagacious in its acts,
in its faith;" ... "if the family of Lorraine had the signal honor of
personifying, during a space of nearly fifty years, the Catholic cause
in France, it owed this honor to the faith, to the sincere zeal, and to
the great qualities of its princes, not to the schemes of ambition." A
more important work, the _History of the Princes of Conde_, by the Duc
d'Aumale, in seven volumes, is much more impartial, though the
distinguished author's sympathies are naturally enlisted in this
subject. He quotes with just appreciation the answer of the young Prince
of Conde, Henri de Bourbon, to Charles IX after the massacre, when the
king summoned him before him and curtly gave him his choice: "_Messe,
mort, ou Bastille?_" (the mass, death, or the Bastile.) "God will not
permit, my king and my seigneur, that I should select the first. As for
the other two, they are at your discretion, which may God temper with
His Providence."

"The intellectual life of the people," says the author of the _Memoires
du peuple francais_, "had gained, rather than lost, amid the terrible
emotions of public affairs. In the interiors of the houses, everything
demonstrated that literature, the arts, the sciences, commerce, and
industry were far from having succumbed during the long crises of the
preceding reigns." It was during the reign of Charles IX that the
beginning of the year was fixed at the first of January, by an edict
issued in 1564. It had previously been considered as commencing at
Easter.

Henri de Navarre and the young Duc d'Alencon were retained as prisoners
in the Louvre, where they amused themselves by flying quails in their
rooms and making love to the ladies. The young prince escaped first, on
the evening of the 15th of September, 1575, but the king did not succeed
in evading the vigilance of his keepers till the following February,
when he took advantage of a hunt in the forest of Senlis, to ride to
rejoin _Monsieur_, his young brother-in-law, and the Prince de Conde,
thus abjuring the vows of the Church, which he had taken under
compulsion. The _Paix de Monsieur_ which followed, signed on the 17th of
April, 1576, granted the followers of Luther and Calvin the fr