the mad efforts of the people, and
you will find the reason of the unpopularity and also the popularity
of certain personages. Laubardemont and Laffemas were, like some men of
to-day, devoted to the defence of power in which they believed. Soldiers
or judges, they all obeyed royalty. In these days d'Orthez would be
dismissed for having misunderstood the orders of the ministry, but
Charles X. left him governor of a province. The power of the many is
accountable to no one; the power of one is compelled to render account
to its subjects, to the great as well as to the small.

Catherine, like Philip the Second and the Duke of Alba, like the Guises
and Cardinal Granvelle, saw plainly the future that the Reformation was
bringing upon Europe. She and they saw monarchies, religion, authority
shaken. Catherine wrote, from the cabinet of the kings of France, a
sentence of death to that spirit of inquiry which then began to threaten
modern society; a sentence which Louis XIV. ended by executing. The
revocation of the Edict of Nantes was an unfortunate measure only so far
as it caused the irritation of all Europe against Louis XIV. At another
period England, Holland, and the Holy Roman Empire would not have
welcomed banished Frenchmen and encouraged revolt in France.

Why refuse, in these days, to the majestic adversary of the most
barren of heresies the grandeur she derived from the struggle itself?
Calvinists have written much against the "craftiness" of Charles IX.;
but travel through France, see the ruins of noble churches, estimate the
fearful wounds given by the religionists to the social body, learn what
vengeance they inflicted, and you will ask yourself, as you deplore the
evils of individualism (the disease of our present France, the germ of
which was in the questions of liberty of conscience then agitated),--you
will ask yourself, I say, on which side were the executioners. There
are, unfortunately, as Catherine herself says in the third division of
this Study of her career, "in all ages hypocritical writers always ready
to weep over the fate of two hundred scoundrels killed necessarily."
Caesar, who tried to move the senate to pity the attempt of Catiline,
might perhaps have got the better of Cicero could he have had an
Opposition and its newspapers at his command.

Another consideration explains the historical and popular disfavor
in which Catherine is held. The Opposition in France has always been
Protestant, becau