(four hundred and ninety-five thousand francs of the present day) was allowed for that purpose.  Donations and legacies to be so applied were authorized.  The children of Protestants were admitted into the universities, colleges, schools, and hospitals, without distinction between them and Catholics.  There was great difficulty in securing for them, in all the Parliaments of the kingdom, impartial justice; and a special chamber, called the edict-chamber, was instituted for the trial of all causes in which they were interested.  Catholic judges could not sit in this chamber unless with their consent and on their presentation.  In the Parliaments of Bordeaux, Toulouse, and Grenoble, the edict-chamber was composed of two presidents, one a Catholic and the other a Reformer, and of twelve councillors, of whom six were Reformers.  The Parliaments had hitherto refused to admit Reformers into their midst; in the end the Parliament of Paris admitted six, one into the edict-chamber and five into the appeal-chamber (enquetes).  The edict of Nantes retained, at first for eight years and then for four more, in the hands of the Protestants the towns which war or treaties had put in their possession, and which numbered, it is said, two hundred.  The king was bound to bear the burden of keeping up their fortifications and paying their garrisons; and Henry IV. devoted to that object five hundred and forty thousand livres of those times, or about two million francs of our day.  When the edict thus regulating the position and rights of Protestants was published, it was no longer on their part, but on that of the Catholics, that lively protests were raised.  Many Catholics violently opposed the execution of the new law; they got up processions at Tours to excite the populace against the edict, and at Le Mans to induce the Parliament of Normandy to reject it.  The Parliament of Paris put in the way of its registration retardations which seemed to forebode a refusal.  Henry summoned to the Louvre deputies from all the chambers.  “What I have done,” he said to them, “is for the good of peace.  I have made it abroad; I wish to make it at home.  Necessity forced me to this decree.  They who would prevent it from passing would have war.  You see me in my closet.  I speak to you, not in royal robe, or with sword and cape, as my predecessors did, nor as a prince receiving an embassy, but as a father of a family in his doublet conversing familiarly with his children.  It is said that I am minded to favor them of the religion; there is a mind to entertain some mistrust of me. . . .  I know that cabals have been got up in the Parliament, that seditious preachers have been set on. . . .  The preachers utter words by way of doctrine for to build up rather than pull down sedition.  That is the road formerly, taken to the making of barricades, and to proceeding by degrees to the parricide of the late king.  I will cut the roots of all these factions; I will make short work of those who foment them.  I have scaled the walls of cities; you may be sure I shall scale barricades.  You must consider that what I am doing is for a good purpose, and let my past behavior go bail for it.”