last tender kiss, with the babe in her womb, from the ruins of her
home, and the slaughter of her kinsmen, supposed herself
treacherously deserted. For him, on the other hand, "the pity of
it," the pity of the thing supplied all that had been wanting in its
first consecration, and made the lost mistress really a wife. His
recoil from that damaging theory of his conduct brought home to a
sensitive conscience the fact that there had indeed been a measure of
self-indulgent weakness in his acts, and made him the creature for
the rest of his days of something like remorse.

The gaiety, the strange devils' gaiety of France, at least in all
places whither its royalty came, ended appropriately in a marriage--a
marriage of "The Reform" in the person of Prince Henry of Navarre, to
Catholicism in the person of Margaret of Valois, Margaret of the
"Memoirs," Charles's sister, in tacit defiance of, or indifference
to, the Pope. With the great Huguenot leaders, with the princes of
the house of Guise, and the Court, like one united family, all in
gaudy evidence in its streets, Paris, ever with an eye for the chance
of amusement, always preoccupied with the visible side of things,
always Catholic--was bidden to be tolerant for a moment, to carry no
fire-arms under penalties, "to renew no past [121] quarrels," and
draw no sword in any new one. It was the perfect stroke of
Catherine's policy, the secret of her predominance over her sons,
thus, with a flight of purchaseable fair women ever at command, to
maintain perpetual holiday, perpetual idleness, with consequent
perpetual, most often idle, thoughts about marriage, amid which the
actual conduct of affairs would be left to herself. Yet for Paris
thus Catholic, there was certainly, even if the Pope were induced to
consent, and the Huguenot bride-groom to "conform," something illicit
and inauspicious about this marriage within the prohibited degrees of