Thus the champion of the fierce Huguenots, the well-beloved of the dead La Noue and the living Duplessis Mornay, the devoted knight of the heretic Queen Elizabeth, the sworn ally of the stout Dutch Calvinists, was pompously reconciled to that Rome which was the object of their hatred and their fear.

The admirably arranged spectacles of the instruction at St. Denis and the consecration at Chartres were followed on the day of the vernal equinox by a third and most conclusive ceremony: 

A secret arrangement had been made with De Cosse-Brissac, governor of Paris, by the king, according to which the gates of Paris were at last to be opened to him.  The governor obtained a high price for his services—­ three hundred thousand livres in hard cash, thirty thousand a year for his life, and the truncheon of marshal of France.  Thus purchased, Brissac made his preparations with remarkable secrecy and skill.  Envoy Ybarra, who had scented something suspicious in the air, had gone straight to the governor for information, but the keen Spaniard was thrown out by the governor’s ingenuous protestations of ignorance.  The next morning, March 22nd, was stormy and rainy, and long before daylight Ybarra, still uneasy despite the statements of Brissac, was wandering about the streets of Paris when he became the involuntary witness of an extraordinary spectacle.

Through the wind and the rain came trampling along the dark streets of the capital a body of four thousand troopers and lansquenettes.  Many torch-bearers attended on the procession, whose flambeaux threw a lurid light upon the scene.

There, surrounded by the swart and grizzly bearded visages of these strange men-at-arms, who were discharging their arquebuses, as they advanced upon any bystanders likely to oppose their progress; in the very midst of this sea of helmed heads, the envoy was enabled to recognise the martial figure of the Prince of Bearne.  Armed to the teeth, with sword in hand and dagger at side, the hero of Ivry rode at last through the barriers which had so long kept him from his capital. “’Twas like enchantment,” said Ybarra.  The first Bourbon entered the city through the same gate out of which the last Valois had, five years before, so ignominiously fled.  It was a midnight surprise, although not fully accomplished until near the dawn of day.  It was not a triumphal entrance; nor did Henry come as the victorious standard-bearer of a great principle.  He had defeated the League in many battle-fields, but the League still hissed defiance at him from the very hearthstone of his ancestral palace.  He had now crept, in order to conquer, even lower than the League itself; and casting off his Huguenot skin at last, he had soared over the heads of all men, the presiding genius of the holy Catholic Church.

Twenty-one years before, he had entered the same city on the conclusion of one of the truces which had varied the long monotony of the religious wars of France.  The youthful son of Antony Bourbon and Joan of Albret had then appeared as the champion and the idol of the Huguenots.  In the same year had come the fatal nuptials with the bride of St. Bartholomew, the first Catholic conversion of Henry and the massacre at which the world still shudders.