1592 than he bad shown himself twenty years before at the Bartholomew
festival. And he had wit enough to foresee that the "instruction" which
the gay free-thinker held so cautiously in his fingers might perhaps turn
out the trump card. A bold, valorous Frenchman with a flawless title,
and washed whiter than snow by the freshet of holy water, might prove a
more formidable claimant to the allegiance of Frenchmen than a foreign
potentate, even though backed by all the doctors of the Sorbonne.

The murder of President Brisson and his colleagues by the confederates of
the sixteen quarters, was in truth the beginning of the end. What seemed
a proof of supreme power was the precursor of a counter-revolution,
destined ere long to lead farther than men dreamed. The Sixteen believed
themselves omnipotent. Mayenne being in their power, it was for them to
bestow the crown at their will, or to hold it suspended in air as long as
seemed best to them. They felt no doubt that all the other great cities
in the kingdom would follow the example of Paris.

But the lieutenant-general of the realm felt it time for him to show that
his authority was not a shadow--that he was not a pasteboard functionary
like the deceased cardinal-king, Charles X. The letters entrusted by the
Sixteen to Claude Mathieu were intercepted by Henry, and, very probably,
an intimation of their contents was furnished to Mayenne. At any rate,
the duke, who lacked not courage nor promptness when his own interests
were concerned, who felt his authority slipping away from him, now that
it seemed the object of the Spaniards to bind the democratic party to
themselves by a complicity in crime, hastened at once to Paris,
determined to crush these intrigues and to punish the murderers of the
judges. The Spanish envoy Ybarra, proud, excitable, violent, who had
been privy to the assassinations, and was astonished that the deeds had
excited indignation and fury instead of the terror counted upon,