of her death, he exclaimed: "It is not a woman, it is
monarchy itself that has died!"

Catherine had, in the highest degree, the sense of royalty, and she
defended it with admirable courage and persistency. The reproaches which
Calvinist writers have cast upon her are to her glory; she incurred them
by reason only of her triumphs. Could she, placed as she was, triumph
otherwise than by craft? The whole question lies there.

As for violence, that means is one of the most disputed questions of
public policy; in our time it has been answered on the Place Louis
XV., where they have now set up an Egyptian stone, as if to obliterate
regicide and offer a symbol of the system of materialistic policy which
governs us; it was answered at the Carmes and at the Abbaye; answered
on the steps of Saint-Roch; answered once more by the people against
the king before the Louvre in 1830, as it has since been answered
by Lafayette's best of all possible republics against the republican
insurrection at Saint-Merri and the rue Transnonnain. All power,
legitimate or illegitimate, must defend itself when attacked; but the
strange thing is that where the people are held heroic in their victory
over the nobility, power is called murderous in its duel with the
people. If it succumbs after its appeal to force, power is then called
imbecile. The present government is attempting to save itself by two
laws from the same evil Charles X. tried to escape by two ordinances;
is it not a bitter derision? Is craft permissible in the hands of power
against craft? may it kill those who seek to kill it? The massacres of
the Revolution have replied to the massacres of Saint-Bartholomew. The
people, become king, have done against the king and the nobility what
the king and the nobility did against the insurgents of the sixteenth
century. Therefore the popular historians, who know very well that in a
like case the people will do the same thing over again, have no excuse
for blaming Catherine de' Medici and Charles IX.

"All power," said Casimir Perier, on learning what power ought to be,
"is a permanent conspiracy." We admire the anti-social maxims put
forth by daring writers; why, then, this disapproval which, in France,
attaches to all social truths when boldly proclaimed? This question will
explain, in itself alone, historical errors. Apply the answer to
the destructive doctrines which flatter popular passions, and to the
conservative doctrines which repress