Gaston de Latour | Page 5

catholic France very generally believed that the Huguenot leaders had a scheme for possessing themselves of the person of the young king, known to be mentally pliable. Meanwhile they led him to their daintiest apartment, with great silver flambeaux, that he might wash off the blood with which not his hands only were covered; for he hunted also with the eagerness of a madman--steeped in blood. He lay there for a few hours, after supping very familiarly on his own birds, Gaston rising from [15] his bed to look on at a distance, and, afterwards, on his knee, serving the rose-water dish and spiced wine, as the night passed in reassuring silence; Charles himself, as usual, keenly enjoying this "gipsy" incident, with the supper after that unexpected fashion, among strange people, he hardly knew where. He was very pale, like some cunning Italian work in wax or ivory, of partly satiric character, endued by magic or crafty mechanism with vivacious movement. But as he sat thus, ever for the most part the unhappy plaything of other people's humours, escaped for a moment out of a world of demoniac politicians, the pensive atmosphere around seemed gradually to change him, touching his wild temper, pleasantly, profitably, so that he took down from the wall and struck out the notes of a lute, and fell to talking of verses, leaving a stanza of his own scratched with a diamond on the window-pane--lines simpler- hearted, and more full of nature than were common at that day.
The life of Gaston de Latour was almost to coincide with the duration of the Religious Wars. The earliest public event of his memory was that famous siege of Orleans from which the young Henri de Guise rode away the head of his restless family, tormented now still further by the reality or the pretence of filial duty, seeking vengeance on the treacherous murder of his father. Following a long period of quiet progress--the tranquil and tolerant years of the [16] Renaissance-- the religious war took possession of, and pushed to strangely confused issues, a society somewhat distraught by an artificial aesthetic culture; and filled with wild passions, wildly-dramatic personalities, a scene already singularly attractive by its artistic beauty. A heady religious fanaticism was worked by every prominent egotist in turn, pondering on his chances, in the event of the extinction of the house of Valois with the three sons of Catherine de Medici, born unsound, and doomed by astrological prediction. The old manors, which had exchanged their towers for summer-houses under the softening influence of Renaissance fashions, found themselves once more medievally insecure amid a vagrant warfare of foreign mercenaries and armed peasants. It was a curiously refined people who now took down the armour, hanging high on the wall for decoration among newer things so little warlike.
A difficult age, certainly, for scrupulous spirits to move in! A perplexed network of partizan or personal interests underlay, and furnished the really directing forces in, a supposed Armageddon of contending religious convictions. The wisest perhaps, like Michel de L'H?pital, withdrew themselves from a conflict, in which not a single actor has the air of quite pure intentions; while religion, itself the assumed ground of quarrel, seems appreciable all the while only by abstraction from the parties, the leaders, at once violent [17] and cunning, who are most pretentious in the assertion of its rival claims. What there was of religion was in hiding, perhaps, with the so-called "Political" party, professedly almost indifferent to it, but which had at least something of humanity on its side, and some chance of that placidity of mind in which alone the business of the spirit can be done. The new sect of "Papists" were not the true catholics: there was little of the virtue of the martyr in militant Calvinism. It is not a catholic historian who notes with profound regret "that inauspicious day," in the year 1562, Gaston's tenth year, "when the work of devastation began, which was to strip from France that antique garniture of religious art which later ages have not been able to replace." Axe and hammer at the carved work sounded from one end of France to the other.
It was a peculiarity of this age of terror, that every one, including Charles the Ninth himself, dreaded what the accident of war might make, not merely of his enemies, but of temporary allies and pretended friends, in an evenly balanced but very complex strife--of merely personal rivals also, in some matter which had nothing to do with the assumed motives of that strife. Gaston de Latour passing on his country way one night, with a sudden flash of fierce words two young men burst from the doors of a road-side tavern. The brothers are quarrelling about [18] the division, lately