ill explain to what heights of power the duke and
the cardinal had attained. In spite of their wealth and the
enormous revenues of their several offices, they were so personally
disinterested, so eagerly carried away on the current of their
statesmanship, and so generous at heart, that they were always in debt,
doubtless after the manner of Caesar. When Henri III. caused the death
of the second Balafre, whose life was a menace to him, the house of
Guise was necessarily ruined. The costs of endeavoring to seize the
crown during a whole century will explain the lowered position of this
great house during the reigns of Louis XIII. and Louis XIV., when
the sudden death of MADAME told all Europe the infamous part which a
Chevalier de Lorraine had debased himself to play.

Calling themselves the heirs of the dispossessed Carolovingians, the
duke and cardinal acted with the utmost insolence towards Catherine de'
Medici, the mother-in-law of their niece. The Duchesse de Guise spared
her no mortification. This duchesse was a d'Este, and Catherine was
a Medici, the daughter of upstart Florentine merchants, whom the
sovereigns of Europe had never yet admitted into their royal fraternity.
Francois I. himself has always considered his son's marriage with a
Medici as a mesalliance, and only consented to it under the expectation
that his second son would never be dauphin. Hence his fury when his
eldest son was poisoned by the Florentine Montecuculi. The d'Estes
refused to recognize the Medici as Italian princes. Those former
merchants were in fact trying to solve the impossible problem of
maintaining a throne in the midst of republican institutions. The title
of grand-duke was only granted very tardily by Philip the Second, king
of Spain, to reward those Medici who bought it by betraying France their
benefactress, and servilely attaching themselves to the court of Spain,
which was at the very time covertly counteracting them in Italy.

"Flatter none but your enemies," the famous saying of Catherine de'
Medici, seems to have been the political rule of life with that family
of merchant princes, in which great men were never lacking until their
destinies became great, when they fell, before their time, into that
degeneracy in which royal races and noble families are wont to end.

For three generations there had been a great Lorrain warrior and a great
Lorrain churchman; and, what is more singular, the churchmen all bore a
strong resemb