held as hostages, while the Huguenots again rallied and retired to their
strong fortress of La Rochelle. Their last hopes centred in this
fortress, defended by only fifteen thousand men, under the brave La
None, while the royal army embraced the flower of the French nobility,
commanded by the Dukes of Anjou and Alençon. But these royal dukes were
compelled to raise the siege, 1573, with a loss of forty thousand men. I
regard the successful defence of this fortress, at this crisis, as the
most fortunate event in the whole Huguenot contest, since it enabled the
Huguenots to make a stand against the whole power of the monarchs. It
did not give them victory, but gave them a place to rally; and it
proclaimed the fact that the contest would not end until the Protestants
had achieved their liberties or were utterly annihilated.

Soon after this successful and glorious defence of La Rochelle, Charles
IX. died, at the age of twenty-four, in awful agonies,--the victim of
remorse and partial insanity, in the hours of which the horrors of St.
Bartholomew were ever present to his excited imagination, and when he
beheld wild faces of demons and murdered Huguenots rejoicing in his
torments, and heard strange voices consigning his name to infamy and his
body to those never-ending physical torments in which both Catholics and
Protestants equally believed. His mother however remained cold,
inflexible, and unmoved,--for when a woman falls under the grip of the
Devil, then no man can equal her in shamelessness and reckless sin.

Charles IX. was succeeded, in 1574, by his brother the King of Poland,
under the name of Henry III., who was equally under the control of his
mother Catherine.

Two years afterward the King of Navarre succeeded in making his escape,
and joined the Huguenot army at Tours. He was now twenty-three. He