crowns the bushel, for the prices recorded placed it beyond the reach of all but the extremely wealthy.  The flesh of horses, asses, dogs, cats, rats had become rare luxuries.  There was nothing cheap, said a citizen bitterly, but sermons.  And the priests and monks of every order went daily about the streets, preaching fortitude in that great resistance to heresy, by which Paris was earning for itself a crown of glory, and promising the most direct passage to paradise for the souls of the wretched victims who fell daily, starved to death, upon the pavements.  And the monks and priests did their work nobly, aiding the general resolution by the example of their own courage.  Better fed than their fellow citizens, they did military work in trench, guard-house and rampart, as the population became rapidly unfit, from physical exhaustion, for the defence of the city.

The young Duke of Nemours, governor of the place, manifested as much resolution and conduct in bringing his countrymen to perdition as if the work in which he was engaged had been the highest and holiest that ever tasked human energies.  He was sustained in his task by that proud princess, his own and Mayenne’s mother, by Madame Montpensier, by the resident triumvirate of Spain, Mendoza, Commander Moreo, and John Baptist Tasais, by the cardinal legate Gaetano, and, more than all, by the sixteen chiefs of the wards, those municipal tyrants of the unhappy populace.

Pope Sixtus himself was by no means eager for the success of the League.  After the battle of Ivry, he had most seriously inclined his ear to the representations of Henry’s envoy, and showed much willingness to admit the victorious heretic once more into the bosom of the Church.  Sixtus was not desirous of contributing to the advancement of Philip’s power.  He feared his designs on Italy, being himself most anxious at that time to annex Naples to the holy see.  He had amassed a large treasure, but he liked best to spend it in splendid architecture, in noble fountains, in magnificent collections of art, science, and literature, and, above all, in building up fortunes for the children of his sister the washerwoman, and in allying them all to the most princely houses of Italy, while never allowing them even to mention the name of their father, so base was his degree; but he cared not to disburse from his hoarded dollars to supply the necessities of the League.

But Gaetano, although he could wring but fifty thousand crowns from his Holiness after the fatal fight of Ivry, to further the good cause, was lavish in expenditures from his own purse and from other sources, and this too at a time when thirty-three per cent. interest was paid to the usurers of Antwerp for one month’s loan of ready money.  He was indefatigable, too, and most successful in his exhortations and ghostly consolations to the people.  Those proud priests and great nobles were playing a reckless game, and the hopes of mankind beyond the grave were the counters