ade him go on in the good way he and his companions had
entered. Beza, not blind to the difficulties that still beset their
path, replied that their highest desires were for truth and peace, but
that a good beginning only had been made.[1167] The Cardinal of
Lorraine, after reading the article, expressed the belief that the
prelates of Poissy would be pleased,[1168] and for his own part seemed
to regard the Protestants as having surrendered the entire ground of
controversy to the Roman Catholics.[1169] But both queen and cardinal
were soon undeceived. The assembled prelates rejected the modified
article with scorn, treating with insult the deputies that brought it,
as having betrayed their cause and played into the hands of the
reformers.[1170] Under these circumstances a continuation of the
conference would have been absurd. The Roman Catholic deputies,
despairing of any good fruits from their efforts at conciliation, never
returned; and the last vestige of the colloquy, on which such brilliant
anticipations had been based, vanished into thin air.[1171] The prelates
themselves continued to sit for a few days. A committee of three bishops
and sundry doctors of the Sorbonne, to whom the article agreed upon by
the Roman Catholic and Huguenot delegates was submitted for examination,
pronounced it (on the sixth of October) to be incomplete, dangerous, and
heretical. Three days later the prelates published a formal condemnation
of it, offered a definition which they declared to be orthodox, and
called upon the king to require Beza and his companions either to sign
this new formula, or to consult the public peace by leaving France
altogether. A long series of canons, in which the question of church
discipline was touched lightly, and that of doctrine not at all--the
paltry result of more than two months of sufficiently animated,[1172] if
not very harmonious discussion--was at the same time given to the
world.[1173]

[Sidenote: Catharine's financial success.]

From a political point of view, the assembly of the prelates at Poissy
had not been unprofitable to the government. Alarmed by the radical
projects of the wholesale confiscation of ecclesiastical property which
had found no little favor with the other orders at Pontoise, equally
alarmed by the possibility of being compelled to enter into a full and
fair discussion with the champions of the Protestant doctrines, the
wealthy dignitaries of the Gallican Church brought them