precluding knowledge how certain facts had really gone, a shadow
which veiled from others a particular act of his and the true
character of its motives.

For, the scene of events being now contracted very closely to Paris,
the predestined actors therein were gradually drawn thither as into
some narrow battlefield or slaughter-house or fell trap of destiny,
and Gaston, all unconsciously, along with them--he and his private
fortunes involved in those larger ones. Result of chance, or fate,
or cunning prevision, there are in the acts great and little--the
acts and the words alike--of the king and his associates, at this
moment, coincidences which give them at least superficially the
colour of an elaborate conspiracy. [118] Certainly, as men looked
back afterwards, all the seemingly random doings of those restless
months ending in the Noces Vermeilles marriage of Henry of Navarre
with Margaret of France, lent themselves agreeably to the theory of a
great plot to crush out at one blow, in the interest of the reigning
Valois, not the Huguenots only but the rival houses of Guise and
Bourbon. The word, the act, from hour to hour through what presented
itself at the time as a long-continued season of frivolity, suggested
in retrospect alike to friend and foe the close connexion of a
mathematical problem. And yet that damning coincidence of date, day
and hour apparently so exactly timed, in the famous letter to the
Governor of Lyons, by which Charles, the trap being now ready, seems
to shut all the doors upon escaping victims, is admitted even by
Huguenot historians to have been fortuitous. Gaston, recalling to
mind the actual mien of Charles as be passed to and fro across the
chimeric scene, timid, and therefore constitutionally trustful
towards older persons, filially kissing the hand of the grim Coligni-
-Mon pere! Mon pere!--all his calineries in that age of courtesy and