at the Arsenal; fireworks, bonfires, and illuminations made a city of flame of Paris for several successive nights; while joyous acclamations rent the air, and the gratified citizens congratulated each other as they perambulated the streets as though each had experienced some personal benefit.  The fact that Anne of Austria, the daughter of Philip III of Spain, was born only five days previous to the Dauphin, was another source of delight to the French people, who regarded the circumstance as an earnest of the future union of the two kingdoms, a prophecy which was afterwards fulfilled by the marriage of the two royal children.

We have already made more than one allusion to the belief in magic, sorcery, and astrology which at this period had obtained in France, and by which many, even of the most enlightened of her nobles and citizens, suffered themselves to be trammelled and deluded; and however much we of the present day may be inclined to pity or to despise so great a weakness, we shall do well to remember that human progress during the last sixty years has been more marked and certain than that which had taken place in the lapse of the three previous centuries.  It is true that there were a few strong-minded individuals even at the period of which we treat who refused to submit their reason to the wild and illogical superstitions which were rife about them; but these formed a very small portion of the aggregate population, and from the peasant in his hovel to the monarch on his throne the plague-spot of credulity had spread and festered, until it presented a formidable feature in the history of the time.  It is curious to remark that L’Etoile, the most commonplace and unimaginative of chroniclers, who might well have been expected in his realism to treat such phantasies as puerile and absurd, seems to justify to his own mind the extreme penalties of the scaffold and the stake as a fitting punishment for sorcerers and magicians:  declaring them, as he records in his usual terse and matter-of-fact style, to be dictated by justice, and essential to the repression of an intercourse between men and evil spirits.

Gabrielle d’Estrees was the dupe, if, indeed, not the victim, of her firm faith in astrology.  She had been assured that “a child would prevent her from attaining the rank to which she aspired;” [146] and the predisposition of an excited nervous system probably assisted the verification of the prophecy.  The old Cardinal de Bourbon,[147] whom the Leaguers would fain have made their king, was seduced from his fidelity to the illustrious race from which he sprang by his weak reliance upon the predictions of soothsayers, who thus degraded him into the tool of the wily Due de Guise;[148] while his nephew, Charles II, also a Cardinal,[149] even more infatuated than himself, had been impelled to believe that the disease which was rapidly sapping his existence was the effect of the machinations of a Court lady by whom he had been bewitched!