Saint-Bartholomew. The people, become king, have done against the king
and the nobility what the king and the nobility did against the
insurgents of the sixteenth century. Therefore the popular historians,
who know very well that in a like case the people will do the same
thing over again, have no excuse for blaming Catherine de' Medici and
Charles IX.

"All power," said Casimir Perier, on learning what power ought to be,
"is a permanent conspiracy." We admire the anti-social maxims put
forth by daring writers; why, then, this disapproval which, in France,
attaches to all social truths when boldly proclaimed? This question
will explain, in itself alone, historical errors. Apply the answer to
the destructive doctrines which flatter popular passions, and to the
conservative doctrines which repress the mad efforts of the people,
and you will find the reason of the unpopularity and also the
popularity of certain personages. Laubardemont and Laffemas were, like
some men of to-day, devoted to the defence of power in which they
believed. Soldiers or judges, they all obeyed royalty. In these days
d'Orthez would be dismissed for having misunderstood the orders of the
ministry, but Charles X. left him governor of a province. The power of
the many is accountable to no one; the power of one is compelled to
render account to its subjects, to the great as well as to the small.

Catherine, like Philip the Second and the Duke of Alba, like the
Guises and Cardinal Granvelle, saw plainly the future that the
Reformation was bringing upon Europe. She and they saw monarchies,
religion, authority shaken. Catherine wrote, from the cabinet of the
kings of France, a sentence of death to that spirit of inquiry which
then began to threaten modern society; a sentence which Louis XIV.
ended by executing. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes was an