by the wide-spread notoriety given to this “act of faith.”  Ten thousand persons camped in the adjoining fields the night before the day on which the horrible spectacle was appointed to take place.  The roofs on the houses were crowded with spectators, and windows were let at ten pounds apiece,—­an enormous sum in those days.  The poor old father had engaged, as we may well believe, one of the best places from which the eye could take in the whole of the terrible scene, where so many men of noble blood were to perish on a vast scaffold covered with black cloth, erected in the middle of the open square.  Thither, on the morning of the fatal day, they brought the chouquet,—­a name given to the block on which the condemned man laid his head as he knelt before it.  After this they brought an arm-chair draped with black, for the clerk of the Parliament, whose business it was to call up the condemned noblemen to their death and read their sentences.  The whole square was guarded from early morning by the Scottish guard and the gendarmes of the king’s household, in order to keep back the crowd which threatened to fill it before the hour of the execution.

After a solemn mass said at the chateau and in the churches of the town, the condemned lords, the last of the conspirators who were left alive, were led out.  These gentlemen, some of whom had been put to the torture, were grouped at the foot of the scaffold and surrounded by monks, who endeavored to make them abjure the doctrines of Calvin.  But not a single man listened to the words of the priests who had been appointed for this duty by the Cardinal of Lorraine; among whom the gentlemen no doubt feared to find spies of the Guises.  In order to avoid the importunity of these antagonists they chanted a psalm, put into French verse by Clement Marot.  Calvin, as we all know, had ordained that prayers to God should be in the language of each country, as much from a principle of common sense as in opposition to the Roman worship.  To those in the crowd who pitied these unfortunate gentlemen it was a moving incident to hear them chant the following verse at the very moment when the king and court arrived and took their places:—­

  “God be merciful unto us,
    And bless us! 
  And show us the light of his countenance,
    And be merciful unto us.”

The eyes of all the Reformers turned to their leader, the Prince de Conde, who was placed intentionally between Queen Mary and the young Duc d’Orleans.  Catherine de’ Medici was beside the king, and the rest of the court were on her left.  The papal nuncio stood behind Queen Mary; the lieutenant-general of the kingdom, the Duc de Guise, was on horseback below the balcony, with two of the marshals of France and his staff captains.  When the Prince de Conde appeared all the condemned noblemen who knew him bowed to him, and the brave hunchback returned their salutation.

“It would be hard,” he remarked to the Duc d’Orleans, “not to be civil to those about to die.”