kinship. In fact, the cunningly sought papal dispensation never
came; Charles, with apparent unconcern, fulfilled his threat, and did
without it; must needs however trick the old Cardinal de Bourbon into
performing his office, not indeed "in the face of the Church," but in
the open air outside the doors of the cathedral of Notre-Dame, the
Catholics quietly retiring into the interior, when that starveling
ceremony was over, to hear the nuptial mass. Still, the open air,
the August sunshine, had lent the occasion an irresistible physical
gaiety in this hymeneal Assumption weather. Paris, suppressing its
scruples, its conscientious and unconscientious hatreds, at least for
a season, had adorned herself as that fascinating city always has
been able to adorn herself, if with something of artifice, certainly
[121] with great completeness, almost to illusion. Whatever gloom
the Middle Age with its sins and sorrows might have left there, was
under gallant disguise to-day. In the train of the young married
people, jeunes premiers in an engagement which was to turn out almost
as transitory as a stage-play, a long month of masquerade meandered
night and day through the public places. His carnality and hers, so
startling in their later developments, showed now in fact but as the
engaging force of youth, since youth, however unpromising its
antecedents, can never have sinned irretrievably. Yet to curious
retrospective minds not long afterwards, these graceful follies would
seem tragic or allegoric, with an undercurrent of infernal irony
throughout. Charles and his two brothers, keeping the gates of a
mimic paradise in the court of the Louvre, while the fountains ran
wine--were they already thinking of a time when they would keep those
gates, with iron purpose, while the gutters ran blood?

If Huguenots were disgusted with the frivolities of the hour, passing
on the other side of the street in sad attire, plotting, as some have