d added to the height of her
ramparts. Night and day the work of perfecting the means of defence went
on; the guard at every gate was doubled, and knowing how often a city had
been taken by surprise, not a hole through which a Papist could creep was
left in the fortifications. In dread of what the future might bring,
Nimes even committed sacrilege against the past, and partly demolished
the Temple of Diana and mutilated the amphitheatre--of which one gigantic
stone was sufficient to form a section of the wall. During one truce the
crops were sown, during another they were garnered in, and so things went
on while the reign of the Mignons lasted. At length the prince raised up
by God, whom the Huguenots had waited for so long, appeared; Henri IV
ascended the, throne.

But once seated, Henri found himself in the same difficulty as had
confronted Octavius fifteen centuries earlier, and which confronted Louis
Philippe three centuries later--that is to say, having been raised to
sovereign power by a party which was not in the majority, he soon found
himself obliged to separate from this party and to abjure his religious
beliefs, as others have abjured or will yet abjure their political
beliefs; consequently, just as Octavius had his Antony, and Louis
Philippe was to have his Lafayette, Henri IV was to have his Biron. When
monarchs are in this position they can no longer have a will of their own
or personal likes and dislikes; they submit to the force of
circumstances, and feel compelled to rely on the masses; no sooner are
they freed from the ban under which they laboured than they are obliged
to bring others under it.

However, before having recourse to extreme measures, Henri IV with
soldierly frankness gathered round him all those who had been his
comrades of old in war and in religion; he spread out before them a map
of France, and showed them that hardly a tenth of the immense number of
its inhabitants were Protestants, and that even that tenth was shut up in
the mountains; some in Dauphine, which had been won for them by their
three principal leaders, Baron des Adrets, Captain Montbrun, and
Lesdiguieres; others in the Cevennes, which had become Protestant through
their great preachers, Maurice Secenat and Guillaume Moget; and the rest
in the mountains of Navarre, whence he himself had come. He recalled to
them further that whenever they ventured out of their mountains they had
been beaten in every battle, at Jarna