“And yet you want to spare them!” cried Calvin, embracing de Beze.  Then he took Chaudieu’s hand and said:  “Above all, no Huguenots, no Reformers, but Calvinists!  Use no term but Calvinism.  Alas! this is not ambition, for I am dying,—­but it is necessary to destroy the whole of Luther, even to the name of Lutheran and Lutheranism.”

“Ah! man divine,” cried Chaudieu, “you well deserve such honors.”

“Maintain the uniformity of the doctrine; let no one henceforth change or remark it.  We are lost if new sects issue from our bosom.”

We will here anticipate the events on which this Study is based, and close the history of Theodore de Beze, who went to Paris with Chaudieu.  It is to be remarked that Poltrot, who fired at the Duc de Guise fifteen months later, confessed under torture that he had been urged to the crime by Theodore de Beze; though he retracted that avowal during subsequent tortures; so that Bossuet, after weighing all historical considerations, felt obliged to acquit Beze of instigating the crime.  Since Bossuet’s time, however, an apparently futile dissertation, apropos of a celebrated song, has led a compiler of the eighteenth century to prove that the verses on the death of the Duc de Guise, sung by the Huguenots from one end of France to the other, was the work of Theodore de Beze; and it is also proved that the famous song on the burial of Marlborough was a plagiarism on it.[*]

[*] One of the most remarkable instances of the transmission of songs is that of Marlborough.  Written in the first instance by a Huguenot on the death of the Duc de Guise in 1563, it was preserved in the French army, and appears to have been sung with variations, suppressions, and additions at the death of all generals of importance.  When the intestine wars were over the song followed the soldiers into civil life.  It was never forgotten (though the habit of singing it may have lessened), and in 1781, sixty years after the death of Marlborough, the wet-nurse of the Dauphin was heard to sing it as she suckled her nursling.  When and why the name of the Duke of Marlborough was substituted for that of the Duc de Guise has never been ascertained.  See “Chansons Populaires,” par Charles Nisard:  Paris, Dentu, 1867.—­Tr.

XIV

CATHERINE IN POWER

The day on which Theodore de Beze and Chaudieu arrived in Paris, the court returned from Rheims, where Charles IX. was crowned.  This ceremony, which Catherine made magnificent with splendid fetes, enabled her to gather about her the leaders of the various parties.  Having studied all interests and all factions, she found herself with two alternatives from which to choose; either to rally them all to the throne, or to pit them one against the other.  The Connetable de Montmorency, supremely Catholic, whose nephew, the Prince de Conde, was leader of the Reformers, and whose sons were inclined to the new religion, blamed the alliance of the queen-mother with the Reformation.