men's hearts which unfortunately belongs
only to God, would have certainly enjoyed the strangest spectacle to be
found in all the annals of the melancholy human comedy.

But this observer who was absent from the inner courts of the Louvre was
to be found in the streets gazing with flashing eyes and breaking out
into loud threats; this observer was the people, who, with its
marvellous instinct made keener by hatred, watched from afar the shadows
of its implacable enemies and translated the impressions they made with
as great clearness as an inquisitive person can do before the windows of
a hermetically sealed ball-room. The music intoxicates and governs the
dancers, but the inquisitive person sees only the movement and laughs at
the puppet jumping about without reason, because the inquisitive person
hears no music.

The music that intoxicated the Huguenots was the voice of their pride.

The gleams which caught the eyes of the Parisians that midnight were the
lightning flashes of their hatred illuminating the future.

And meantime everything was still festive within, and a murmur softer
and more flattering than ever was at this moment pervading the Louvre,
for the youthful bride, having laid aside her toilet of ceremony, her
long mantle and flowing veil, had just returned to the ball-room,
accompanied by the lovely Duchesse de Nevers, her most intimate friend,
and led by her brother, Charles IX., who presented her to the principal
guests.

The bride was the daughter of Henry II., was the pearl of the crown of
France, was MARGUERITE DE VALOIS, whom in his familiar tenderness for
her King Charles IX. always called "_ma soeur Margot_," "my sister
Margot."

Assuredly never was any welcome, however flattering, more richly
deserved than that which the new Queen of Navarre was at this moment
receiving. Marguerite at this period was scarcely twenty, and she was
already the object of all the poets' eulogies, some of whom compared her
to Aurora, others to Cytherea; she was, in truth, a beauty without rival
in that court in which Catharine de Medicis had assembled the loveliest
women she could find, to make of them her sirens.

Marguerite had black hair and a brilliant complexion; a voluptuous eye,
veiled by long lashes; delicate coral lips; a slender neck; a graceful,
opulent figure, and concealed in a satin slipper a tiny foot. The
French, who possessed her, were proud to see such a lovely flower
flourishing in their soil,