es. Catharine of Medicis was all smiles and affability;
the Duke of Anjou, afterwards Henry III., received graciously the
compliments paid him by the Huguenots themselves on his successes at
Jarnac and Moncontour, battles which he had won before he was eighteen
years old; Henry of Guise, whose reputation as a leader already, at the
age of two-and-twenty, almost equalled that of his great father, was
courteous and friendly to those whose deadly foe he had so lately been.
The Duke of Mayenne and the Admiral, the Guise and the Conde, were seen
riding, conversing, and making parties of pleasure together. It was the
lion lying down with the lamb.

On the twenty-second of August, four days after the marriage, in which the
Huguenots saw a guarantee of the peaceful exercise of their religion, the
Admiral de Coligny was passing through the street of St Germain
l'Auxerrois, when he was shot at and wounded by a captain of _petardiers_,
one Maurevel, who went by the name of _Le Tueur du Roi_, literally, the
King's Killer. At midnight on the twenty-fourth of August, the tocsin
sounded, and the massacre of St Bartholomew began.

It is at this stirring period of French history, abounding in horrors and
bloodshed, and in plots and intrigues, both political and amorous, that M.
Alexandre Dumas commences one of his most recently published romances.
Beginning with the marriage of Henry and Margaret, he narrates, in his
spirited and attractive style, various episodes, real and imaginary, of
the great massacre, from the first fury of which, Henry himself, doomed to
death by the remorseless Catherine of Medicis, was only saved by his own
caution, by the indecision of Charles IX., and the energy of Margaret of
Valois. The marriage between the King of France's sister and the King of
Navarre, was merely one of _convenance_, agreed to by Henry for the sake
of his fellow Protestants, and used by Catherine and Charles as a lure to
bring "those of the religion," as they were called, to Paris, there to be
slaughtered unsuspecting, and defenceless. Margaret, then scarcely twenty
years of age, had already made herself talked of by her intrigues; Henry,
who was a few months younger, but who, even at that early period of his
life, possessed a large share of the shrewdness and prudence for which his
countrymen, the Bearnese, have at all times been noted, was, at the very
time of his marriage, deeply in love with the Baroness de Sauve, one of
Catharine de