ggravate for France the evils which it was their business to heal. In
1575, a year only after Henry III.'s accession, revolt penetrated to the
royal household. The Duke of Alencon, the king's younger brother, who,
since his brother's coronation, took the title of Duke of Anjou, escaped
on the 15th of September from the Louvre by a window, and from Paris by a
hole made in the wall of circumvallation. He fled to Dreux, a town in
his appanage, and put himself at the head of a large number of
malcontents, nobles and burgesses, Catholic and Reformed, mustered around
him under this name of no religious significance between the two old
parties. On the 17th of September, in his manifesto, he gave as reasons
for his revolt, excessive taxation, waste of the public revenues, the
feebleness of the royal authority, incapable as it was of putting a stop
to the religious troubles, and the disgrace which had been inflicted upon
himself "by pernicious ministers who desire to have the government in
their sole patronage, excluding from it the foremost and the most
illustrious of the court, and devouring all that there is remaining to
the poor people." He protested his devotion to the king his brother, at
the same time declaring war against the Guises.

King Henry of Navarre, testifying little sympathy with the Duke of Anjou,
remained at court, abandoning himself apparently to his pleasures alone.
Two of his faithful servants (the poet-historian D'Aubigne was one of
them) heard him one night sighing as he lay in bed, and humming half
aloud this versicle from the eighty-eighth Psalm:--

"Removed from friends, I sigh alone,
In a loathed dungeon laid, where none
A visit will vouchsafe to me,
Confined past hope of liberty."

"Sir," said D'Aubigne eagerly, "it is true, then, that the Sprit of God
worketh and dwelleth in you still? You sigh unto God because of the
absence of your friends and faithful servants; and all the while they are
together, sighing because of yours and laboring for your freedom. But
you have only tears in your eyes, and they, arms in hand, are fighting
your enemies. As for us two, we were talking of taking to flight
tomorrow, when your voice made us draw the curtain. Bethink you, sir,
that, after us, the hands that will serve you would not dare refuse to
employ poison and the knife." Henry, much moved, resolved to follow the
example of the Duke of An