Afterwards he retired to a pavilion behind the altar, where the archbishop confessed and absolved him.  Then the Te Deum sounded, and high mass was celebrated by the Bishop of Nantes.  Then, amid acclamations and blessings, and with largess to the crowd, the king returned to the monastery of Saint Denis, where he dined amid a multitude of spectators, who thronged so thickly around him that his dinner-table was nearly overset.  These were the very Parisians, who, but three years before, had been feeding on rats and dogs and dead men’s bones, and the bodies of their own children, rather than open their gates to this same Prince of Bearne.

Now, although Mayenne had set strong guards at those gates, and had most strictly prohibited all egress, the city was emptied of its populace, which pressed in transports of adoration around the man so lately the object of their hate.  Yet few could seriously believe that much change had been effected in the inner soul of him, whom the legate, and the Spaniard, and the holy father at Rome still continued to denounce as the vilest of heretics and the most infamous of impostors.

The comedy was admirably played out and was entirely successful.  It may be supposed that the chief actor was, however, somewhat wearied.  In private, he mocked at all this ecclesiastical mummery, and described himself as heartily sick of the business.  “I arrived here last evening,” he wrote to the beautiful Gabrielle, “and was importuned with ’God save you’ till bed-time.  In regard to the Leaguers I am of the order of St. Thomas.  I am beginning to-morrow morning to talk to the bishops, besides those I told you about yesterday.  At this moment of writing I have a hundred of these importunates on my shoulders, who will make me hate Saint Denis as much as you hate Mantes.  ’Tis to-morrow that I take the perilous leap.  I kiss a million times the beautiful hands of my angel and the mouth of my dear mistress.”

A truce—­renewed at intervals—­with the Leaguers lasted till the end of the year.  The Duke of Nevers was sent on special mission to Rome to procure the holy father’s consent to the great heretic’s reconciliation to the Church, and he was instructed to make the king’s submission in terms so wholesale and so abject that even some of the life-long papists of France were disgusted, while every honest Protestant in Europe shrank into himself for shame.  But Clement, overawed by Philip and his ambassador, was deaf to all the representations of the French envoy.  He protested that he would not believe in the sincerity of the Bearne’s conversion unless an angel from Heaven should reveal it to him.  So Nevers left Rome, highly exasperated, and professing that he would rather have lost a leg, that he would rather have been sewn in a sack and tossed into the Tiber, than bear back such a message.  The pope ordered the prelates who had accompanied Nevers to remain in Rome and be tried by the Inquisition for misprision of heresy, but the duke placed them by his side and marched out of the Porta del Popolo with them, threatening to kill any man who should attempt to enforce the command.