took place a few days afterwards with such triumph and magnificence as none others of my quality; the King of Navarre and his troop having changed their mourning for very rich and fine clothes, and I being dressed royally, with crown and corset of tufted ermine, all blazing with crown-jewels, and the grand blue mantle with a train four ells long borne by three princesses, the people choking one another down below to see us pass.”  The marriage was celebrated on the 18th of August, by the Cardinal of Bourbon, in front of the principal entrance of Notre-Dame.  When the Princess Marguerite was asked if she consented, she appeared to hesitate a moment; but King Charles IX. put his hand a little roughly on her head, and made her lower it in token of assent.  Accompanied by the king, the queen-mother, and all the Catholics present, Marguerite went to hear mass in the choir; Henry and his Protestant friends walked about the cloister and the nave; Marshal de Damville pointed out to Coligny the flags, hanging from the vaulted roof of Notre-Dame, which had been taken from the vanquished at the battle of Moncontour.  “I hope,” said the admiral, “that they will soon have others better suited for lodgement in this place.”  He was already dreaming of victories over the Spaniards.

Meanwhile Charles IX. was beginning to hesitate.  He was quite willing to disconnect himself from the King of Spain, and even to incur his displeasure, but not to be actively embroiled with him and make war upon him; he could not conceal from himself that this policy, thoroughly French though it was, was considered in France too Protestant for a Catholic king.  Coligny urged him vehemently.  “If you want men,” he said, “I have ten thousand at your service;” whereupon Tavannes said to the king, “Sir, whoever of your subjects uses such words to you, you ought to have his head struck off.  How is it that he offers you that which is your own?  It is that he has won over and corrupted them, and that he is a party-leader to your prejudice.”  Tavannes, a rough and faithful soldier, did not admit that there could be amongst men moral ties of a higher kind than political ties.  Charles IX., too weak in mind and character to think and act with independence and consistency in the great questions of the day, only sought how to elude them, and to leave time, that inscrutable master, to settle them in his place.  His indecision brought him to a state of impotence, and he ended by inability to do anything but dodge and lie, like his mother, and even with his mother.  Whilst he was getting his sister married to the King of Navarre and concerting his policy with Coligny, he was adopting towards the three principal personages who came to talk over those affairs with him three different sorts of language; to Cardinal Alessandrino, whom Pope Pius V. had sent to him to oppose the marriage, he said, “My lord cardinal, all that you say to me is sound; I acknowledge it, and I thank the pope