merchandise, and married
men, women, unborn children, enjoyed revenues as dignitaries of the
church. Infants came into the world, it was said, like the mitre-fish,
stamped with the emblems of place.

"'Twas impossible," said L'Etoile, "to find a crab so tortuous and
backsliding as the government."

This was the aspect of the first of the three factions in France. Such
was the Henry at its head, the representative of royalty.

Henry with the Scar, Duke of Guise, the well-known chief of the house of
Lorraine, was the chief of the extreme papistical party. He was now
thirty-four years of age, tall, stately, with a dark, martial face and
dangerous eyes, which Antonio Moro loved to paint; a physiognomy made
still more expressive by the arquebus-shot which had damaged his left
cheek at the fight near Chateau-Thierry and gained him his name of
Balafre. Although one of the most turbulent and restless plotters of that
plotting age, he was yet thought more slow and heavy in character than
subtle, Teutonic rather than Italian. He was the idol of the Parisian
burghers. The grocers, the market-men, the members of the arquebus and
crossbow clubs, all doated on him. The fishwomen worshipped him as a god.
He was the defender of the good old religion under which Paris and the
other cities of France had thriven, the uncompromising opponent of the
new-fangled doctrines which western clothiers, and dyers, and
tapestry-workers, had adopted, and which the nobles of the
mountain-country, the penniless chevaliers of Bearn and Gascony and
Guienne, were ceaselessly taking the field and plunging France into
misery and bloodshed to support. But for the Balafre and Madam League--as
the great Spanish Catholic conspiracy against the liberties of France,
and of England, and of all Europe, was affectionately termed by the Paris
populace--honest Catholics would fare no better in France than they did
in England, where, as it was well known, they were every day subjected to
fearful tortures: The shopwindows were filled with coloured engravings,
representing, in exaggerated fashion, the sufferings of the English
Catholics under bloody Elizabeth, or Jezebel, as she was called; and as
the gaping burghers stopped to ponder over these works of art, there were
ever present, as if by accident, some persons of superior information who
would condescendingly explain the various pictures, pointing out with a
long stick the phenomena most worthy of notice. These c