At this moment the two brothers, the duke and cardinal, were the arbiters of the greatest revolution attempted in Europe since that of Henry VIII. in England, which was the direct consequence of the invention of printing.  Adversaries to the Reformation, they meant to stifle it, power being in their hands.  But their opponent, Calvin, though less famous than Luther, was far the stronger of the two.  Calvin saw government where Luther saw dogma only.  While the stout beer-drinker and amorous German fought with the devil and flung an inkbottle at his head, the man from Picardy, a sickly celibate, made plans of campaign, directed battles, armed princes, and roused whole peoples by sowing republican doctrines in the hearts of the burghers —­recouping his continual defeats in the field by fresh progress in the mind of the nations.

The Cardinal de Lorraine and the Duc de Guise, like Philip the Second and the Duke of Alba, knew where and when the monarchy was threatened, and how close the alliance ought to be between Catholicism and Royalty.  Charles the Fifth, drunk with the wine of Charlemagne’s cup, believing too blindly in the strength of his monarchy, and confident of sharing the world with Suleiman, did not at first feel the blow at his head; but no sooner had Cardinal Granvelle made him aware of the extent of the wound than he abdicated.  The Guises had but one scheme, —­that of annihilating heresy at a single blow.  This blow they were now to attempt, for the first time, to strike at Amboise; failing there they tried it again, twelve years later, at the Saint-Bartholomew,—­on the latter occasion in conjunction with Catherine de’ Medici, enlightened by that time by the flames of a twelve years’ war, enlightened above all by the significant word “republic,” uttered later and printed by the writers of the Reformation, but already foreseen (as we have said before) by Lecamus, that type of the Parisian bourgeoisie.

The two Guises, now on the point of striking a murderous blow at the heart of the French nobility, in order to separate it once for all from a religious party whose triumph would be its ruin, still stood together on the terrace, concerting as to the best means of revealing their coup-d’Etat to the king, while Catherine was talking with her counsellors.

“Jeanne d’Albret knew what she was about when she declared herself protectress of the Huguenots!  She has a battering-ram in the Reformation, and she knows how to use it,” said the duke, who fathomed the deep designs of the Queen of Navarre, one of the great minds of the century.

“Theodore de Beze is now at Nerac,” remarked the cardinal, “after first going to Geneva to take Calvin’s orders.”

“What men these burghers know how to find!” exclaimed the duke.

“Ah! we have none on our side of the quality of La Renaudie!” cried the cardinal.  “He is a true Catiline.”