powerful monarch of the age to obtain property which did not belong
to him--the sovereignty of a great kingdom, stocked with a dozen millions
of human beings--of all this endless bloodshed of the people in the
interests of a high-born family or two, of all this infamous brokerage
charged by great nobles for their attempts to transfer kingdoms like
private farms from one owner to another? Time was to show. Meanwhile men
trembled at the name of Philip II., and grovelled before him as the
incarnation of sagacity, high policy, and king-craft.

But Mayenne, while taking the brokerage, was less anxious about the
transfer. He had fine instinct enough to suspect that the Bearnese,
outcast though he seemed, might after all not be playing so desperate a
game against the League as it was the fashion to suppose. He knew whether
or not Henry was likely to prove a more fanatical Huguenot in 1592 than
he bad shown himself twenty years before at the Bartholomew festival. And
he had wit enough to foresee that the "instruction" which the gay
free-thinker held so cautiously in his fingers might perhaps turn out the
trump card. A bold, valorous Frenchman with a flawless title, and washed
whiter than snow by the freshet of holy water, might prove a more
formidable claimant to the allegiance of Frenchmen than a foreign
potentate, even though backed by all the doctors of the Sorbonne.

The murder of President Brisson and his colleagues by the confederates of
the sixteen quarters, was in truth the beginning of the end. What seemed
a proof of supreme power was the precursor of a counter-revolution,
destined ere long to lead farther than men dreamed. The Sixteen believed
themselves omnipotent. Mayenne being in their power, it was for them to
bestow the crown at their will, or to hold it suspended in air as long as
seemed best to them. They felt no doubt that all the other great cities
in the kingdom would follow the example of Paris.

But the lieutenant-general of the realm felt it time for him to show that
his authority was not a shadow--that he was not a pasteboard functionary
like the deceased cardinal-king, Charles X. The letters entrusted by the
Sixteen to Claude Mathieu were intercepted by Henry, and, very probably,
an intimation of their contents was furnished to Mayenne. At any rate,
the duke, who lacked not courage nor promptness when his own interests
were concerned, who felt his authority slipping away from him, now that
it seemed t