instead of ordering that horrible murder (pardon my plainness) why not have employed the vast resources of your political power in giving to the Reformers those wise institutions which made the reign of Henri IV. so glorious and so peaceful?’ She smiled again and shrugged her shoulders, the hollow wrinkles of her pallid face giving her an expression of the bitterest sarcasm.  ‘The peoples,’ she said, ’need periods of rest after savage feuds; there lies the secret of that reign.  But Henri IV. committed two irreparable blunders.  He ought neither to have abjured Protestantism, nor, after becoming a Catholic himself, should he have left France Catholic.  He, alone, was in a position to have changed the whole of France without a jar.  Either not a stole, or not a conventicle—­that should have been his motto.  To leave two bitter enemies, two antagonistic principles in a government with nothing to balance them, that is the crime of kings; it is thus that they sow revolutions.  To God alone belongs the right to keep good and evil perpetually together in his work.  But it may be,’ she said reflectively, ’that that sentence was inscribed on the foundation of Henri IV.’s policy, and it may have caused his death.  It is impossible that Sully did not cast covetous eyes on the vast wealth of the clergy,—­which the clergy did not possess in peace, for the nobles robbed them of at least two-thirds of their revenue.  Sully, the Reformer, himself owned abbeys.’  She paused, and appeared to reflect.  ‘But,’ she resumed, ’remember you are asking the niece of a Pope to justify her Catholicism.’  She stopped again.  ‘And yet, after all,’ she added with a gesture of some levity, ’I should have made a good Calvinist!  Do the wise men of your century still think that religion had anything to do with that struggle, the greatest which Europe has ever seen?—­a vast revolution, retarded by little causes which, however, will not be prevented from overwhelming the world because I failed to smother it; a revolution,’ she said, giving me a solemn look, ’which is still advancing, and which you might consummate.  Yes, you, who hear me!’ I shuddered.  ’What! has no one yet understood that the old interests and the new interests seized Rome and Luther as mere banners?  What! do they not know Louis IX., to escape just such a struggle, dragged a population a hundredfold more in number than I destroyed from their homes and left their bones on the sands of Egypt, for which he was made a saint? while I—­But I,’ she added, ‘failed.’  She bowed her head and was silent for some moments.  I no longer beheld a queen, but rather one of those ancient druidesses to whom human lives are sacrificed; who unroll the pages of the future and exhume the teachings of the past.  But soon she uplifted her regal and majestic form.  ‘Luther and Calvin,’ she said, ’by calling the attention of the burghers to the abuses of the Roman Church, gave birth in Europe to a spirit of investigation which was certain to lead