f Alencon, he was
invested with sovereign power over the three most important provinces
of the realm, with an annual income of one hundred thousand crowns.
This celebrated treaty, called the _Paix de Monsieur_, because
concluded under the auspices of Francis, the brother of the king, was
signed at Chastenoy the sixth of May, 1576.

The ambitious and perfidious duke now assumed the title of the Duke of
Anjou, and entirely separated himself from the Protestants. He tried
to lure the Prince of Conde, the cousin and devoted friend of Henry of
Navarre, to accompany him into the town of Bourges. The prince,
suspecting treachery, refused the invitation, saying that some rogue
would probably be found in the city who would send a bullet through
his head.

"The rogue would be hanged, I know," he added, "but the Prince of
Conde would be dead. I will not give you occasion, my lord, to hang
rogues for love of me."

He accordingly took his leave of the Duke of Alencon, and, putting
spurs to his horse, with fifty followers joined the King of Navarre.

Henry was received with royal honors in the Protestant town of
Rochelle, where he publicly renounced the Roman Catholic faith,
declaring that he had assented to that faith from compulsion, and as
the only means of saving his life. He also publicly performed penance
for the sin which he declared that he had thus been compelled to
commit.

Catharine and Henry III., having detached Francis, who had been the
Duke of Alencon, but who was now the Duke of Anjou, from the
Protestants, no longer feigned any friendship or even toleration for
that cause. They acted upon the principle that no faith was to be kept
with heretics. The Protestants, notwithstanding the treaty, were
exposed to every species of insult and injury. The Catholics were
determined that the Protestant religion should not be tolerated in
France, and that all who did not conform to the Church of Rome should
either perish or be driven from the kingdom. Many of the Protestants
were men of devoted piety, who cherished their religious convictions
more tenaciously than life. There were others, however, who joined
them merely from motives of political ambition. Though the Protestant
party, in France itself, was comparatively small, the great mass of
the population being Catholics, yet the party was extremely
influential from the intelligence and the rank of its leaders, and
from the unconquerable energy with which all of its memb