many other innocent men and women had
not only provoked the Divine retribution, but had diminished not a little
the reputation and influence of the French with all orders of persons in
Germany.[1341] Henry listened with commendable patience to the old
elector's denunciations, alleging by way of excuse that the French court
had been under the influence of the passions then running high, and
readily promised great caution and tolerance in future.[1342] He did,
indeed, strike on his breast and begged Frederick to believe him that
things had occurred otherwise than had been reported. But his auditor
dryly remarked that he was fully informed of what had taken place in
France.[1343] As the elector also took occasion to remind Anjou of sundry
miserable deaths of notorious persecutors, such as Herod the Great, Herod
Agrippa, and Maxentius; as he openly ridiculed the absurd suggestion that
Coligny, a wounded man, with both arms disabled in consequence of
Maurevel's shot, planned on his bed an attack on the king; and as,
furthermore, he plainly denounced the shocking immorality of Catharine de'
Medici's court ladies--it must be confessed that Frederick the Pious, on
the present occasion, made more of a virtue of frankness than of
diplomacy.[1344]

On Sunday the French left Heidelberg, with little regret on their own part
or on that of their hosts. Not to speak of their treatment by the elector,
which even the historian De Thou regarded as scarcely comporting with the
dignity with which Henry was invested,[1345] the followers of the Polish
king met with frequent insults, both in coming and in going. One of them
relates how he heard cries of "Those dogs from Lorraine! Those Italian
traitors!" And a German eye-witness of the scenes expresses it as his
opinion that the French nobles would not have been safe had they not been
escorted by the palatine troops. The sight of "that notable cut-throat,
the Duke of Nevers," of the Marshal de Retz, of Captain Du Gast, and "very
many others of that band of villains who so cruelly butchered the admiral
and other nobles in Paris," provoked the populace almost beyond endurance.
The very diamonds and jewels presented by Henry on his departure, to the
elector and to the ladies of his court, aroused the popular indignation;
for they were known, as we have already seen, to have constituted a part
of the plunder of a certain rich Huguenot jeweller, whose shop had been
robbed at the time of the Parisian