egun to tutor us on that subject."

Calonne became very attentive, and his neighbor, Madame de Genlis,
rather anxious. The little provincial still hesitated, and Beaumarchais
said to him somewhat roughly:--

"Go on, _maitre_, go on! Don't you know that when the laws allow but
little liberty the people seek their freedom in their morals?"

Thus adjured, the small man told his tale:--

"Whether it was that certain ideas were fermenting in my brain, or
that some strange power impelled me, I said to her: 'Ah! madame, you
committed a very great crime.' 'What crime?' she asked in a grave voice.
'The crime for which the signal was given from the clock of the palace
on the 24th of August,' I answered. She smiled disdainfully, and a few
deep wrinkles appeared on her pallid cheeks. 'You call that a crime
which was only a misfortune,' she said. 'The enterprise, being
ill-managed, failed; the benefit we expected for France, for Europe,
for the Catholic Church was lost. Impossible to foresee that. Our
orders were ill executed; we did not find as many Montlucs as we
needed. Posterity will not hold us responsible for the failure of
communications, which deprived our work of the unity of movement which
is essential to all great strokes of policy; that was our misfortune!
If on the 25th of August not the shadow of a Huguenot had been left in
France, I should go down to the uttermost posterity as a noble image of
Providence. How many, many times have the clear-sighted souls of Sixtus
the Fifth, Richelieu, Bossuet, reproached me secretly for having failed
in that enterprise after having the boldness to conceive it! How many
and deep regrets for that failure attended my deathbed! Thirty years
after the Saint-Bartholomew the evil it might have cured was still in
existence. That failure caused ten times more blood to flow in France
than if the massacre of August 24th had been completed on the 26th. The
revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in honor of which you have struck
medals, has cost more tears, more blood, more money, and killed the
prosperity of France far more than three Saint-Bartholomews. Letellier
with his pen gave effect to a decree which the throne had secretly
promulgated since my time; but, though the vast execution was necessary
of the 25th of August, 1572, on the 25th of August, 1685, it was
useless. Under the second son of Henri de Valois heresy had scarcely
conceived an offspring; under the second son of Henri de Bourbon