me time, as Cardinal Richelieu afterwards remarked, pierced the
heart of every patriotic Frenchman.

The ambassador made a sign, which De Vic understood; to lower his flag
and to refrain from answering the fire. Thus a battle between allies,
amid the most amazing circumstances, was avoided, but it may well be
imagined how long and how deeply the poison of the insult festered.

Such an incident could hardly predispose the ambassador in favour of the
nation he was about to visit, or strengthen his hope of laying, not only
the foundation of a perpetual friendship between the two crowns, but of
effecting the palingenesis of Europe. Yet no doubt Sully--as the world
has so long learned to call him--was actuated by lofty sentiments in many
respects in advance of his age. Although a brilliant and successful
campaigner in his youth, he detested war, and looked down with contempt
at political systems which had not yet invented anything better than
gunpowder for the arbitrament of international disputes. Instead of war
being an occasional method of obtaining peace, it pained him to think
that peace seemed only a process for arriving at war. Surely it was no
epigram in those days, but the simplest statement of commonplace fact,
that war was the normal condition of Christians. Alas will it be
maintained that in the two and a half centuries which have since elapsed
the world has made much progress in a higher direction? Is there yet any
appeal among the most civilized nations except to the logic of the
largest battalions and the eloquence of the biggest guns?

De Rosny came to be the harbinger of a political millennium, and he
heartily despised war. The schemes, nevertheless, which were as much his
own as his master's, and which he was instructed to lay before the
English monarch as exclusively his own, would have required thirty years
of successful and tremendous warfare before they could have a beginning
of development.

It is not surprising that so philosophical a mind as his, while still
inclining to pacific designs, should have been led by what met his eyes
and ears to some rather severe generalizations.

"It is certain that the English hate us," he said, "and with a hatred so
strong and so general that one is tempted to place it among the natural
dispositions of this people. Yet it is rather the effect of their pride
and their presumption; since there is no nation in Europe more haughty,
more disdainful, more besotted with