speak of the number of victims throughout the whole of France; De Thou estimates it at thirty thousand, Sully at seventy thousand, Perefixe, Archbishop of Paris in the seventeenth century, raises it to one hundred thousand; Papirius Masson and Davila reduce it to ten thousand, without clearly distinguishing between the massacre of Paris and those of the provinces; other historians fix upon forty thousand.  Great uncertainty also prevails as to the execution of the orders issued from Paris to the governors at the provinces; the names of the Viscount d’Orte, governor of Bayonne, and of John le Hennuyer, Bishop of Lisieux, have become famous from their having refused to take part in the massacre; but the authenticity of the letter from the Viscount d’Orte to Charles IX. is disputed, though the fact of his resistance appears certain; and as for the bishop, John le Hennuyer, M. de Formeville seems to us to have demonstrated in his Histoire de l’ancien Eveche-comte de Lisieux (t. ii. pp. 299-314), “that there was no occasion to save the Protestants of Lisieux, in 1572, because they did not find themselves in any danger of being massacred, and that the merit of it cannot be attributed to anybody, to the bishop, Le Hennuyer, any more than to Captain Fumichon, governor of the town.  It was only the general course of events and the discretion of the municipal officers of Lisieux that did it all.”  One thing which is quite true, and which it is good to call to mind in the midst of so great a general criminality, is that, at many spots in France, it met with a refusal to be associated in it; President Jeannin at Dijon, the Count de Tende in Provence, Philibert de la Guiche at Macon, Tanneguy le Veneur de Carrouge at Rouen, the Count de Gordes in Dauphiny, and many other chiefs, military or civil, openly repudiated the example set by the murderers of Paris; and the municipal body of Nantes, a very Catholic town, took upon this subject, as has been proved from authentic documents by M. Vaurigaud, pastor of the Reformed Church at Nantes [in his Essai sur l’Histoire des Eglises reformees de Bretagne, t. i. pp. 190-194], a resolution which does honor to its patriotic firmness as well as to its Christian loyalty.

[Illustration:  Chancellor Michael de l’Hospital——­376]

A great, good man, a great functionary, and a great scholar, in disgrace for six years past, the Chancellor Michael de l’Hospital, received about this time, in his retreat at Vignay, a visit from a great philosopher, Michael de Montaigne, “anxious,” said the visitor, “to come and testify to you the honor and reverence with which I regard your competence and the special qualities which are in you; for, as to the extraneous and the fortuitous, it is not to my taste to put them down in the account.”  Montaigne chose a happy moment for disregarding all but the personal, and special qualities of the chancellor; shortly after his departure, L’Hospital was warned that some sinister-looking horsemen were coming,