e flower of his
chivalry, by the only man who could rescue France from ruin, and whom
France could look up to with respect.

For, on the 20th October, Henry of Navarre had at last gained a victory.
After twenty-seven years of perpetual defeat, during which they had been
growing stronger and stronger, the Protestants had met the picked troops
of Henry III., under the Due de Joyeuse, near the burgh of Contras. His
cousins Conde and Soissons each commanded a wing in the army of the
Warnese. "You are both of my family," said Henry, before the engagement,
"and the Lord so help me, but I will show you that I am the eldest born."
And during that bloody day the white plume was ever tossing where the
battle, was fiercest. "I choose to show myself. They shall see the
Bearnese," was his reply to those who implored him to have a care for his
personal safety. And at last, when the day was done, the victory gained,
and more French nobles lay dead on the field, as Catharine de' Medici
bitterly declared, than had fallen in a battle for twenty years; when two
thousand of the King's best troops had been slain, and when the bodies of
Joyeuse and his brother had been laid out in the very room where the
conqueror's supper, after the battle, was served, but where he refused,
with a shudder, to eat, he was still as eager as before--had the wretched
Valois been possessed of a spark of manhood, or of intelligence--to
shield him and his kingdom from the common enemy.'

For it could hardly be doubtful, even to Henry III., at that moment, that
Philip II. and his jackal, the Duke of Guise, were pursuing him to the
death, and that, in his breathless doublings to escape, he had been
forced to turn upon his natural protector. And now Joyeuse was defeated
and slain. "Had it been my brother's son," exclaimed Cardinal de Bourbon,
weeping and wailing, "how much better it would have been." It was not
easy to slay the champion of French Protestantism; yet, to one less
buoyant, the game, even after the brilliant but fruitless victory of
Contras, might have seemed desperate. Beggared and outcast, with
literally scarce a shirt to his back, without money to pay a corporal's
guard, how was he to maintain an army?

But 'Mucio' was more successful than Joyeuse had been, and the German and
Swiss mercenaries who had come across the border to assist the Bearnese,
were adroitly handled by Philip's great stipendiary. Henry of Valois,
whose troops had just been defeat