tation of Him whom he represents on earth, he will show mercy,
and not proceed to acts which would drive the King of France to despair."
During the great struggle with which Europe was engaged in the sixteenth
century, the independence of states, religious tolerance, and political
liberty thus sometimes found, besides their regular and declared
champions, protectors, useful on occasion although they were timid, even
amongst the habitual allies of Charles V.'s despotic and persecuting
successor.

On arriving before Paris towards the end of July, 1589, the two kings
besieged it with an army of forty-two thousand men, the strongest and the
best they had ever had under their orders. "The affairs of Henry III.,"
says De Thou, "had changed face; fortune was pronouncing for him."
Quartered in the house of Count de Retz, at St. Cloud, he could thence
see quite at his ease his city of Paris. "Yonder," said he, "is the
heart of the League; it is there that the blow must be struck. It was
great pity to lay in ruins so beautiful and goodly a city. Still, I must
settle accounts with the rebels who are in it, and who ignominiously
drove me away." "On Tuesday, August 1, at eight A. M., he was told,"
says L'Estoile, "that a monk desired to speak with him, but that his
guards made a difficulty about letting him in. 'Let him in,' said the
king: 'if he is refused, it will be said that I drive monks away and will
not see them.' Incontinently entered the monk, having in his sleeve a
knife unsheathed. He made a profound reverence to the king, who had just
got up and had nothing on but a dressing-gown about his shoulders, and
presented to him despatches from Count de Brienne, saying that he had
further orders to tell the king privately something of importance. Then
the king ordered those who were present to retire, and began reading the
letter which the monk had brought asking for a private audience
afterwards; the monk, seeing the king's attention taken up with reading,
drew his knife from his sleeve and drove it right into the king's small
gut, below the navel, so home that he left the knife in the hole; the
which the king having drawn out with great exertion struck the monk a
blow with the point of it on his left eyebrow, crying, 'Ah! wicked monk!
he has killed me; kill him!' At which cry running quickly up, the guards
and others, such as happened to be nearest, massacred this assassin of a
Jacobin who, as D'Aubigne says, stretch