rmination of the
heretics of France, or their reconciliation with the Church of Rome, but
he ascribed to Charles in making the request the declared purpose of
continuing a work for which his own means had proved inadequate. The
reception of the document was in itself an act of bad faith, and the
chancellor resisted it to the utmost of his power, urging that the pontiff
should be requested to alter its objectionable form.[571]

[Sidenote: Another quarrel between Lorraine and the chancellor.]

Another of those painful scenes occurred in the privy council (on the
nineteenth of September), of which there had been so many within the past
four or five years. Again the disputants were the Cardinal of Lorraine and
the chancellor. The former angrily demanded the reason why L'Hospital had
refused to affix his signature to the bull; whereupon the latter alleged,
among many other grounds, that to revoke the Edict of Pacification, as
demanded by the Pope, "was the direct way to cause open wars, and to bring
the Germans into the realm." The cardinal was "much stirred." He called
L'Hospital a hypocrite; he said that his wife and daughter were
Calvinists. "You are not the first of your race that has deserved ill of
the king," he added. "I am sprung from as honest a race as you are,"
retorted the other. Beside himself with fury, Lorraine "gave him the lie,
and, rising incontinently out of his chair," would have seized him by the
beard, had not Marshal Montmorency stepped in between them. "Madam," said
the cardinal, "in great choler," turning to the queen mother, in whose
presence the angry discussion took place, "the chancellor is the sole
cause of all the troubles in France, and were he in the hands of
parliament his head would not tarry on his shoulders twenty-four hours."
"On the contrary, Madam," rejoined L'Hospital, "the cardinal is the
original cause of all the mischiefs that have chanced as well to France,
within these eight years, as to the rest of Christendom. In proof of which
I refer him to the common report of even those who most favor him."[572]

[Sidenote: The chancellor's fall.]

But the chancellor accomplished nothing. Catharine had overcome her weak
son's partiality for the grave old counsellor by persuading him that, as
the chancellor's wife, his daughter, his son-in-law, and indeed his entire
house, were avowedly Huguenots, it was impossible but that he was himself
only restrained from making an open profession of P