It is a duty to faithfully depict this pious and guileless death of a great man, at the close of a vigorous and a glorious life, made up of good and evil, without the evil’s having choked the good.  This powerful and consolatory intermixture of qualities is the characteristic of the eminent men of the sixteenth century, Catholics or Protestants, soldiers or civilians; and it is a spectacle wholesome to be offered in times when doubt and moral enfeeblement are the common malady even of sound minds and of honest men.

The murderer of Duke Francis of Guise was a petty nobleman of Angoumois, John Poltrot, Lord of Mere, a fiery Catholic in his youth, who afterwards became an equally fiery Protestant, and was engaged with his relative La Renaudie in the conspiracy against the Guises.  He had been employed constantly from that time, as a spy it is said, by the chiefs of the Reformers—­a vocation for which, it would seem, he was but little adapted, for the indiscretion of his language must have continually revealed his true sentiments.  When he heard, in 1562, of the death of Anthony de Bourbon, King of Navarre, “That,” said he, “is not what will put an end to the war; what is wanted is the dog with the big collar.”  “Whom do you mean?” asked somebody.  “The great Guisard; and here’s the arm that will do the trick.”  “He used to show,” says D’Aubigne, “bullets cast to slay the Guisard, and thereby rendered himself ridiculous.”  After the battle of Dreux he was bearer of a message from the Lord of Soubise to Admiral de Coligny, to whom he gave an account of the situation of the Reformers in Dauphiny and in Lyonness.  His report no doubt interested the admiral, who gave him twenty crowns to go and play spy in the camp of the Duke of Guise, and, some days later, a hundred crowns to buy a horse.  It was thus that Poltrot was put in a position to execute the design he had been so fond of proclaiming before he had any communication with Coligny.  As soon as, on the 18th of February, 1563, in the outskirts of Orleans, he had, to use his own expression, done his trick, he fled full gallop, so as not to bear the responsibility of it; but, whether it were that he was troubled in his mind, or that he was ill acquainted with the region, he wandered round and round the place where he had shot the Duke of Guise, and was arrested on the 20th of February by men sent in search of him.  Being forthwith brought before the privy council, in the presence of the queen-mother, and put to the torture, he said that Admiral de Coligny, Theodore de Beze, La Rochefoucauld, Soubise, and other Huguenot chiefs had incited him to murder the Duke of Guise, persecutor of the faithful, “as a meritorious deed in the eyes of God and men.”  Coligny repudiated this allegation point blank.  Shrinking from the very appearance of hypocrisy, he abstained from any regret at the death of the Duke of Guise.  “The greatest blessing,” said he, “which could come to this realm and to the church of God,