, with fifteen wounds,
lingered for thirty-three days, Henry constantly at his bedside and
offering in vain large sums of money to the surgeons to save him.

Less than four years after St. Bartholomew the Peace of 1576 gave the
Huguenots all they had ever demanded or hoped for. In 1582 died the
Duke of Alencon, Catherine's last surviving son and heir to the
throne; Henry, in spite of a pilgrimage on foot by himself and his
queen to Notre Dame de Clery from which they returned with blistered
feet, gave no hope of posterity and the Catholic party were confronted
by the possibility of the sceptre of St. Louis descending to a
relapsed heretic. A tremendous wave of feeling ran through France, and
a Holy League was formed to meet the danger, with the Duke of Guise as
leader. The king tried in vain to win some of the Huguenot and League
partisans by the solemn institution of the Order of the Holy
Ghost,[121] in the church of the Augustinians, to commemorate his
elevation to the thrones of Poland and France on the day of Pentecost.
The people were equally recalcitrant. When Henry entered Paris after
the campaign of 1587, they shouted for their idol, the Balafre,[122]
crying, "Saul has slain his thousands but David his tens of
thousands." The king in his jealousy and disgust forbade Guise to
enter Paris; Guise coolly ignored the command, and a few months later
arrived at the head of a formidable train of nobles, amid the joyous
acclamation of the people, who greeted him with chants of "_Hosannah,
Filio David!_" Angry scenes followed. The duke sternly called his
master to duty, and warned him to take vigorous measures against the
Huguenots or lose his crown; the king, pale with anger, dismissed him
and prepared to strike.

[Footnote 121: Examples of magnificent costumes of the order may be
seen in the Cluny Museum.]

[Footnote 122: The Duke of Guise was so called from his face being
scarred by a wound received at the battle of Dolmans.]

On the night of the 11th May a force of Royal Guards and 4,000 Swiss
mercenaries entered Paris, but the Parisians, with that genius for
insurrection which has always characterised them, were equal to the
occasion. The sixteen sections into which the communal government of
the city was divided met; in the morning the people were under arms;
and barricades and chains blocked the streets. The St. Antoine
section, ever to the front, stood up to the king's Guards and to the
Swiss advancing to occ