as done us."

At last, when the duke was forced to admit himself to be on the point of
expiring with fatigue, he was dismissed to the palace with orders to
solace himself with a couple of bottles of excellent wine of Arbois,
expressly provided for him by the king's direction. And this was all the
punishment ever inflicted by the good-humoured monarch on the corpulent
conspirator.

The Duke of Guise made his arrangements with the ex-Huguenot on even
better terms and at a still earlier day; while Joyeuse and Mercoeur stood
out a good while and higgled hard for conditions. "These people put such
a high price on themselves," said one of Henry's diplomatists, "that one
loses almost more than one gains in buying them. They strip and plunder
us even in our nakedness, and we are obliged, in order to conciliate such
harpies, to employ all that we can scrape out of our substance and our
blood. I think, however, that we ought to gain them by whatever means and
at whatever price."

Thus Henry IV., the man whom so many contemporary sages had for years
been rebuking or ridiculing for his persistency in a hopeless attempt to
save his country from dismemberment, to restore legitimate authority, and
to resist the "holy confederacy" of domestic traitors, aided by foreign
despots and sympathizers, was at last successful, and the fratricidal war
in France was approaching its only possible conclusion.

But, alas! the hopes of those who loved the reformed Church as well as
they loved their country were sadly blasted by the apostasy of their
leader. From the most eminent leaders of the Huguenots there came a wail,
which must have penetrated even to the well-steeled heart of the cheerful
Gascon. "It will be difficult," they said, "to efface very soon from your
memory the names of the men whom the sentiment of a common religion,
association in the same perils and persecutions, a common joy in the same
deliverance, and the long experience of so many faithful services, have
engraved there with a pencil of diamond. The remembrance of these things
pursues you and accompanies you everywhere; it interrupts your most
important affairs, your most ardent pleasures, your most profound
slumber, to represent to you, as in a picture, yourself to yourself:
yourself not as you are to-day, but such as you were when, pursued to the
death by the greatest princes of Europe, you went on conducting to the
harbour of safety the little vessel against which so many