The queen had become, as the reader will perceive, extremely powerful in a very short time.  The spirit of discussion and controversy which now sprang up was singularly favorable to her position.  The Catholics and the Reformers were equally pleased to exhibit their brilliancy one after another in this tournament of words; for that is what it actually was, and no more.  It is extraordinary that historians have mistaken one of the wiliest schemes of the great queen for uncertainty and hesitation!  Catherine never went more directly to her own ends than in just such schemes which appeared to thwart them.  The king of Navarre, quite incapable of understanding her motives, fell into her plan in all sincerity, and despatched Chaudieu to Calvin, as we have seen.  The minister had risked his life to be secretly in Orleans and watch events; for he was, while there, in hourly peril of being discovered and hung as a man under sentence of banishment.

According to the then fashion of travelling, Chaudieu could not reach Geneva before the month of February, and the negotiations were not likely to be concluded before the end of March; consequently the assembly could certainly not take place before the month of May, 1561.  Catherine, meantime, intended to amuse the court and the various conflicting interests by the coronation of the king, and the ceremonies of his first “lit de justice,” at which l’Hopital and de Thou recorded the letters-patent by which Charles IX. confided the administration to his mother in common with the present lieutenant-general of the kingdom, Antoine de Navarre, the weakest prince of those days.

Is it not a strange spectacle this of the great kingdom of France waiting in suspense for the “yes” or “no” of a French burgher, hitherto an obscure man, living for many years past in Geneva?  The transalpine pope held in check by the pontiff of Geneva!  The two Lorrain princes, lately all-powerful, now paralyzed by the momentary coalition of the queen-mother and the first prince of the blood with Calvin!  Is not this, I say, one of the most instructive lessons ever given to kings by history,—­a lesson which should teach them to study men, to seek out genius, and employ it, as did Louis XIV., wherever God has placed it?

Calvin, whose name was not Calvin but Cauvin, was the son of a cooper at Noyon in Picardy.  The region of his birth explains in some degree the obstinacy combined with capricious eagerness which distinguished this arbiter of the destinies of France in the sixteenth century.  Nothing is less known than the nature of this man, who gave birth to Geneva and to the spirit that emanated from that city.  Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who had very little historical knowledge, has completely ignored the influence of Calvin on his republic.  At first the embryo Reformer, who lived in one of the humblest houses in the upper town, near the church of Saint-Pierre, over a carpenter’s shop (first resemblance between him and Robespierre), had no great