which should never be stained, he said, if he could prevent it,
with such foul deeds. The same language was held by Laval, by
Rochefoucauld, and by the Marechal de Biron, the last gentleman, whose
two sons were engaged in the vile enterprise, bitterly cursing the Duke
to his face, as he rode through the gate after revealing his secret
undertaking.

Meanwhile, Anjou, in addition to the punishment of hearing these
reproaches from men of honor, was the victim of a rapid and violent
fluctuation of feeling. Hope, fear, triumph, doubt, remorse, alternately
swayed him. As he saw the fugitives leaping from the walls, he shouted
exultingly, without accurately discerning what manner of men they were,
that the city was his, that four thousand of his brave soldiers were
there, and were hurling the burghers from the battlements. On being made
afterwards aware of his error, he was proportionably depressed; and when
it was obvious at last that the result of the enterprise was an absolute
and disgraceful failure, together with a complete exposure of his
treachery, he fairly mounted his horse, and fled conscience-stricken from
the scene.

The attack had been so unexpected, in consequence of the credence that
had been rendered by Orange and the magistracy to the solemn
protestations of the Duke, that it had been naturally out of any one's
power to prevent the catastrophe. The Prince was lodged in apart of the
town remote from the original scene of action, and it does not appear
that information had reached him that anything unusual was occurring,
until the affair was approaching its termination. Then there was little
for him to do. He hastened, however, to the scene, and mounting the
ramparts, persuaded the citizens to cease cannonading the discomfited and
retiring foe. He felt the full gravity of the situation, and the
necessity of diminishing the rancor of the inhabitants against their
treacherous allies, if such a result were yet possible. The burghers had
done their duty, and it certainly would have been neither in his power
nor his inclination to protect the French marauders from expulsion and
castigation.

Such was the termination of the French Fury, and it seems sufficiently
strange that it should have been so much less disastrous to Antwerp than
was the Spanish Fury of 1576, to which men could still scarcely allude
without a shudder. One would have thought the French more likely to prove
successful in their enterprise than the