The prince and La Renaudie emphasized the minister’s speech by a gesture, the latter having paused to allow the prince to speak, if he so wished.  Like all great men engaged in plotting, whose system it is to conceal their hand until the decisive moment, the prince kept silence—­but not from cowardice.  In these crises he was always the soul of the conspiracy; recoiling from no danger and ready to risk his own head; but from a sort of royal dignity he left the explanation of the enterprise to his minister, and contented himself with studying the new instrument he was about to use.

“My child,” said Chaudieu, in the Huguenot style of address, “we are about to do battle for the first time with the Roman prostitute.  In a few days either our legions will be dying on the scaffold, or the Guises will be dead.  This is the first call to arms on behalf of our religion in France, and France will not lay down those arms till they have conquered.  The question, mark you this, concerns the nation, not the kingdom.  The majority of the nobles of the kingdom see plainly what the Cardinal de Lorraine and his brother are seeking.  Under pretext of defending the Catholic religion, the house of Lorraine means to claim the crown of France as its patrimony.  Relying on the Church, it has made the Church a formidable ally; the monks are its support, its acolytes, its spies.  It has assumed the post of guardian to the throne it is seeking to usurp; it protects the house of Valois which it means to destroy.  We have decided to take up arms because the liberties of the people and the interests of the nobles are equally threatened.  Let us smother at its birth a faction as odious as that of the Burgundians who formerly put Paris and all France to fire and sword.  It required a Louis XI. to put a stop to the quarrel between the Burgundians and the Crown; and to-day a prince de Conde is needed to prevent the house of Lorraine from re-attempting that struggle.  This is not a civil war; it is a duel between the Guises and the Reformation,—­a duel to the death!  We will make their heads fall, or they shall have ours.”

“Well said!” cried the prince.

“In this crisis, Christophe,” said La Renaudie, “we mean to neglect nothing which shall strengthen our party,—­for there is a party in the Reformation, the party of thwarted interests, of nobles sacrificed to the Lorrains, of old captains shamefully treated at Fontainebleau, from which the cardinal has banished them by setting up gibbets on which to hang those who ask the king for the cost of their equipment and their back-pay.”

“This, my child,” resumed Chaudieu, observing a sort of terror in Christophe, “this it is which compels us to conquer by arms instead of conquering by conviction and by martyrdom.  The queen-mother is on the point of entering into our views.  Not that she means to abjure; she has not reached that decision as yet; but she may be forced to it by our triumph.  However that may be, Queen Catherine,