thought, as their enemies will persuade the Pope, a yet more terrible
massacre of their own, only anticipated by the superior force and
shrewdness of the Catholics, on the very eve of its accomplishment--
they did but serve just now to relieve the predominant white and red,
[123] and thereby double the brilliancy, of a gay picture. Yet a
less than Machiavellian cunning might perhaps have detected, amid all
this sudden fraternity--as in some unseasonably fine weather signs of
coming distress--a risky element of exaggeration in those
precipitately patched-up amities, a certain hollow ring in those
improbable religious conversions, those unlikely reconciliations in
what was after all an age of treachery as a fine art. With Gaston,
however, the merely receptive and poetic sense of life was abundantly
occupied with the spectacular value of the puissant figures in motion
around him. If he went beyond the brilliancy of the present moment
in his wonted pitiful equitable after-thoughts, he was still
concerned only with the more general aspects of the human lot, and
did not reflect that every public movement, however generous in its
tendency, is really flushed to active force by identification with
some narrower personal or purely selfish one. Coligni, "the
Admiral," centre of Huguenot opposition, just, kind, grim, to the
height of inspired genius, the grandest character his faith had yet
produced--undeterred by those ominous voices (of aged women and the
like) which are apt to beset all great actions, yielded readily to
the womanish endearments of Charles, his filial words and fond
touching of the hands, the face, aged at fifty-five--just this
portion of his conduct let us hope being exclusive of his precise
share [124] in the "conspiracy." And the opportune death in Paris of
the Huguenot Queen of Navarre only stirred question for a moment:
autopsy revealed no traces of unfair play, though at a time credulous
as to impossible poisoned perfumes and such things, romantic in its