So they parted.  Next day, however, they visited the Secretary again, and found him more dismal and flaccid than ever.

He spoke feebly and drearily about the succour for the great enterprise, recounted all the difficulties in the way, and, having thrown down everything that the day before had been left standing, he tried to excuse an entire change of policy by the one miserable crime.

He painted a forlorn picture of the council and of France.  “I can myself do nothing as I wish,” added the undisputed controller of that government’s policy, and then with a few more tears he concluded by requesting the envoys to address their demands to the Queen in writing.

This was done with the customary formalities and fine speeches on both sides; a dull comedy by which no one was amused.

Then Bouillon came again, and assured them that there had been a chance that the engagements of Henry, followed up by the promise of the Queen-Regent, would be carried out, but now the fact was not to be concealed that the continued battery of the Nuncius, of the ambassadors of Spain and of the Archdukes, had been so effective that nothing sure or solid was thenceforth to be expected; the council being resolved to accept the overtures of the Archduke for mutual engagement to abstain from the Julich enterprise.

Nothing in truth could be more pitiable than the helpless drifting of the once mighty kingdom, whenever the men who governed it withdrew their attention for an instant from their private schemes of advancement and plunder to cast a glance at affairs of State.  In their secret heart they could not doubt that France was rushing on its ruin, and that in the alliance of the Dutch commonwealth, Britain, and the German Protestants, was its only safety.  But they trembled before the Pope, grown bold and formidable since the death of the dreaded Henry.  To offend his Holiness, the King of Spain, the Emperor, and the great Catholics of France, was to make a crusade against the Church.  Garnier, the Jesuit, preached from his pulpit that “to strike a blow in the Cleve enterprise was no less a sin than to inflict a stab in the body of our Lord.”  The Parliament of Paris having ordered the famous treatise of the Jesuit Mariana—­justifying the killing of excommunicated kings by their subjects—­to be publicly burned before Notre Dame, the Bishop opposed the execution of the decree.  The Parliament of Paris, although crushed by Epernon in its attempts to fix the murder of the King upon himself as the true culprit, was at least strong enough to carry out this sentence upon a printed, volume recommending the deed, and the Queen’s council could only do its best to mitigate the awakened wrath of the Jesuits at this exercise of legal authority.—­At the same time, it found on the whole so many more difficulties in a cynical and shameless withdrawal from the Treaty of Hall than in a nominal and tardy fulfilment of its conditions that it resolved at last