year, "when the work of devastation began, which was to strip from
France that antique garniture of religious art which later ages have
not been able to replace." Axe and hammer at the carved work sounded
from one end of France to the other.

It was a peculiarity of this age of terror, that every one, including
Charles the Ninth himself, dreaded what the accident of war might
make, not merely of his enemies, but of temporary allies and
pretended friends, in an evenly balanced but very complex strife--of
merely personal rivals also, in some matter which had nothing to do
with the assumed motives of that strife. Gaston de Latour passing on
his country way one night, with a sudden flash of fierce words two
young men burst from the doors of a road-side tavern. The brothers
are quarrelling about [18] the division, lately effected there, of
their dead father's morsel of land. "I shall hate you till death!"
cries the younger, bounding away in the darkness; and two atheists
part, to take opposite sides in the supposed strife of Catholic and
Huguenot.

The deeds of violence which occupy the foreground of French history
during the reigns of Catherine's sons might indeed lead one to fancy
that little human kindness could have remained in France,--a
fanatical civil war of forty years, that no place at all could have
been left for the quiet building of character. Contempt for human
life, taught us every day by nature, and alas! by man himself:--all
war intensifies that. But the more permanent forces, alike of human
nature and of the natural world, are on the whole in the interest of
tranquillity and sanity, and of the sentiments proper to man. Like
all good catholic children, Gaston had shuddered at the name of
Adretz, of Briquemaut with his great necklace of priests' ears, of