France. Thus
purchased, Brissac made his preparations with remarkable secrecy and
skill. Envoy Ybarra, who had scented something suspicious in the air, had
gone straight to the governor for information, but the keen Spaniard was
thrown out by the governor's ingenuous protestations of ignorance. The
next morning, March 22nd, was stormy and rainy, and long before daylight
Ybarra, still uneasy despite the statements of Brissac, was wandering
about the streets of Paris when he became the involuntary witness of an
extraordinary spectacle.

Through the wind and the rain came trampling along the dark streets of
the capital a body of four thousand troopers and lansquenettes. Many
torch-bearers attended on the procession, whose flambeaux threw a lurid
light upon the scene.

There, surrounded by the swart and grizzly bearded visages of these
strange men-at-arms, who were discharging their arquebuses, as they
advanced upon any bystanders likely to oppose their progress; in the very
midst of this sea of helmed heads, the envoy was enabled to recognise the
martial figure of the Prince of Bearne. Armed to the teeth, with sword in
hand and dagger at side, the hero of Ivry rode at last through the
barriers which had so long kept him from his capital. "'Twas like
enchantment," said Ybarra. The first Bourbon entered the city through the
same gate out of which the last Valois had, five years before, so
ignominiously fled. It was a midnight surprise, although not fully
accomplished until near the dawn of day. It was not a triumphal entrance;
nor did Henry come as the victorious standard-bearer of a great
principle. He had defeated the League in many battle-fields, but the
League still hissed defiance at him from the very hearthstone of his
ancestral palace. He had now crept, in order to conquer, even lower than
the League itself; and casting off his Huguenot skin at last, he had
soared over the heads of all men, the presiding genius of the holy
Catholic Church.

Twenty-one years before, he had entered the same city on the conclusion
of one of the truces which had varied the long monotony of the religious
wars of France. The youthful son of Antony Bourbon and Joan of Albret had
then appeared as the champion and the idol of the Huguenots. In the same
year had come the fatal nuptials with the bride of St. Bartholomew, the
first Catholic conversion of Henry and the massacre at which the world
still shudders.

Now he was chief of the "Po