nd scarlet stockings, paraded himself daily in
public, clothed in military costume, with all the airs of royalty. Many
persons thought him mad. On the other hand, Epergnon, the haughty
minion-in-chief, who governed Henry III., and insulted all the world, was
becoming almost polite.

"The progress of the League," said Busbecq, "is teaching the Duc d'
Epergnon manners. 'Tis a youth of such insolence, that without uncovering
he would talk with men of royal descent, while they were bareheaded. 'Tis
a common jest now that he has found out where his hat is."

Thus, for a long time, a network of secret political combinations had
been stretching itself over Christendom. There were great movements of
troops throughout Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, slowly
concentrating themselves upon France; yet, on the whole, the great mass
of the populations, the men and women who were to pay, to fight, to
starve, to be trampled upon, to be outraged, to be plundered, to be
burned out of houses and home, to bleed, and to die, were merely
ignorant, gaping spectators. That there was something very grave in
prospect was obvious, but exactly what was impending they knew no more
than the generation yet unborn. Very noiselessly had the patient manager
who sat in the Escorial been making preparations for that European
tragedy in which most of the actors had such fatal parts assigned them,
and of which few of the spectators of its opening scenes were doomed to
witness the conclusion. A shifting and glancing of lights, a vision of
vanishing feet, a trampling and bustling of unseen crowds, movements of
concealed machinery, a few incoherent words, much noise and confusion
vague and incomprehensible, till at last the tinkling of a small bell,
and a glimpse of the modest manager stealing away as the curtain was
rising--such was the spectacle presented at Midsummer 1585,

And in truth the opening picture was effective. Sixteen black-robed,
long-bearded Netherland envoys stalking away, discomfited and indignant
upon one side; Catharine de' Medici on the other, regarding them with a
sneer, painfully contorted into a pathetic smile; Henry the King, robed
in a sack of penitence, trembling and hesitating, leaning on the arm of
Epergnon, but quailing even under the protection of that mighty
swordsman; Mucio, careering, truncheon in hand, in full panoply, upon his
war-horse, waving forward a mingled mass of German lanzknechts, Swiss
musketeers, and Lorra