It was a dark hour for France, and rarely has a great nation been reduced to a lower level by a feeble and abandoned government than she was at that moment under the distaff of Henry III.  Society was corrupted to its core.  “There is no more truth, no more justice, no more mercy,” moaned President L’Etoile.  “To slander, to lie, to rob, to wench, to steal; all things are permitted save to do right and to speak the truth.”  Impiety the most cynical, debauchery the most unveiled, public and unpunished homicides, private murders by what was called magic, by poison, by hired assassins, crimes natural, unnatural, and preternatural, were the common characteristics of the time.  All posts and charges were venal.  Great offices of justice were sold to the highest bidder, and that which was thus purchased by wholesale was retailed in the same fashion.  Unhappy the pauper client who dreamed of justice at the hands of law.  The great ecclesiastical benefices were equally matter of merchandise, and married men, women, unborn children, enjoyed revenues as dignitaries of the church.  Infants came into the world, it was said, like the mitre-fish, stamped with the emblems of place.

“’Twas impossible,” said L’Etoile, “to find a crab so tortuous and backsliding as the government.”

This was the aspect of the first of the three factions in France.  Such was the Henry at its head, the representative of royalty.

Henry with the Scar, Duke of Guise, the well-known chief of the house of Lorraine, was the chief of the extreme papistical party.  He was now thirty-four years of age, tall, stately, with a dark, martial face and dangerous eyes, which Antonio Moro loved to paint; a physiognomy made still more expressive by the arquebus-shot which had damaged his left cheek at the fight near Chateau-Thierry and gained him his name of Balafre.  Although one of the most turbulent and restless plotters of that plotting age, he was yet thought more slow and heavy in character than subtle, Teutonic rather than Italian.  He was the idol of the Parisian burghers.  The grocers, the market-men, the members of the arquebus and crossbow clubs, all doated on him.  The fishwomen worshipped him as a god.  He was the defender of the good old religion under which Paris and the other cities of France had thriven, the uncompromising opponent of the new-fangled doctrines which western clothiers, and dyers, and tapestry-workers, had adopted, and which the nobles of the mountain-country, the penniless chevaliers of Bearn and Gascony and Guienne, were ceaselessly taking the field and plunging France into misery and bloodshed to support.  But for the Balafre and Madam League—­as the great Spanish Catholic conspiracy against the liberties of France, and of England, and of all Europe, was affectionately termed by the Paris populace—­honest Catholics would fare no better in France than they did in England, where, as it was well known, they were every day subjected to fearful tortures: