and you for it; if I had any other means of taking vengeance on my enemies, I would not make this marriage; but I have no other.”  With Jeanne d’Albret, he lauded himself for the marriage as the best policy he could pursue.  “I give my sister,” he said, “not to the Prince of Navarre, but to all the Huguenots, to marry them as it were, and take from them all doubt as to the unchangeable fixity of my edicts.”  And to humor his mother Catherine, he said to her, on the very evening of his interview with Jeanne d’Albret, “What think you, madam?  Do I not play my partlet well?” “Yes, very well; but it is nothing if it is not continued.”  And Charles continued to play his part, even after the Bartholomew was over, for he was fond of saying with a laugh, “My big sister Margot caught all those Huguenot rebels in the bird-catching style.  What has grieved me most is being obliged to dissimulate so long.”

His contemporary Catholic biographer, Papirius Masson, who was twenty-eight years old at the time of the St. Bartholomew, says of him, “He is impatient in waiting, ferocious in his fits of anger, skilfully masked when he wishes, and ready to break faith as soon as that appears to his advantage.”

[Illustration:  Charles IX. and Catherine de’ Medici——­354]

Such was the prince, fiery and flighty, inconsistent and artful, accessible to the most opposite sympathies as well as hatreds, of whom Catherine de’ Medici and Admiral Coligny were disputing the possession.

In the spring of 1572 Coligny might have considered himself the victor in this struggle; at his instance Charles IX. had written on the 27th of April to Count Louis of Nassau, leader of the Protestant insurrection in Hainault, “that he was determined, so far as opportunities and the arrangements of his affairs permitted him, to employ the powers which God had put into his hands for the deliverance of the Low Countries from the oppression under which they were groaning.”  Fortified by this promise of the king’s, Coligny had raised a body of French Protestants, and had sent it under the command of La Noue to join the army of Louis of Nassau.  The Reformers had at first had some successes; they had taken Valenciennes and Mons; but the Duke of Alba restored the fortunes of the King of Spain; he re-entered Valenciennes and he was besieging Mons. Coligny sent to the aid of that place a fresh body of French under the orders of Senlis, one of his comrades in faith and arms.  Before setting out, Senlis saw Charles IX., received from him money together with encouragement, and, in the corps he led, some Catholics were mixed with the Protestants.  But from the very court of France there came to the Duke of Alba warnings which put him in a position to surprise the French corps; and Senlis was beaten and made prisoner on the 10th of July.  “I have in my hands,” the Duke of Alba sent word to his king, “a letter from the King of France which would strike you dumb if you