d
went about from tent to tent with a list of the debts of the Duke of
Anjou, to show that the nation could expect nothing profitable from a
ruined spendthrift. The page of a Polish count flew to Montluc for
protection, entreating permission to accompany the bishop on his return
to Paris. The servants of the count pursued the page; but this young
gentleman had so insinuated himself into the favour of the bishop, that
he was suffered to remain. The next day the page desired Montluc would
grant him the full liberty of his religion, being an evangelical, that
he might communicate this to his friends, and thus fix them to the
French party. Montluc was too penetrating for this young political
agent, whom he discovered to be a spy, and the pursuit of his fellows to
have been a farce; he sent the page back to his master, the evangelical
count, observing that such tricks were too gross to be played on one who
had managed affairs in all the courts of Europe before he came into
Poland.

Another alarm was raised by a letter from the grand vizier of Selim the
Second, addressed to the diet, in which he requested that they would
either choose a king from among themselves, or elect the brother of the
King of France. Some zealous Frenchman at the Sublime Porte had
officiously procured this recommendation from the enemy of Christianity;
but an alliance with Mahometanism did no service to Montluc, either with
the catholics or the evangelicals. The bishop was in despair, and
thought that his handiwork of six months' toil and trouble was to be
shook into pieces in an hour. Montluc, being shown the letter, instantly
insisted that it was a forgery, designed to injure his master the duke.
The letter was attended by some suspicious circumstances; and the French
bishop, quick at expedients, snatched at an advantage which the
politician knows how to lay hold of in the chapter of accidents. "The
letter was not sealed with the golden seal, nor enclosed in a silken
purse or cloth of gold; and farther, if they examined the translation,"
he said, "they would find that it was not written on Turkish paper."
This was a piece of the _sieur's_ good fortune, for the letter was not
forged; but owing to the circumstance that the Boyar of Wallachia had
taken out the letter to send a translation with it, which the vizier had
omitted, it arrived without its usual accompaniments; and the courier,
when inquired after, was kept out of the way: so that, in a few da