For it could hardly be doubtful, even to Henry III., at that moment, that Philip II. and his jackal, the Duke of Guise, were pursuing him to the death, and that, in his breathless doublings to escape, he had been forced to turn upon his natural protector.  And now Joyeuse was defeated and slain.  Had it been my brother’s son,” exclaimed Cardinal de Bourbon, weeping and wailing, “how much better it would have been.”  It was not easy to slay the champion of French Protestantism; yet, to one less buoyant, the game, even after the brilliant but fruitless victory of Contras, might have seemed desperate.  Beggared and outcast, with literally scarce a shirt to his back, without money to pay a corporal’s guard, how was he to maintain an army?

But ‘Mucio’ was more successful than Joyeuse had been, and the German and Swiss mercenaries who had come across the border to assist the Bearnese, were adroitly handled by Philip’s great stipendiary.  Henry of Valois, whose troops had just been defeated at Contras, was now compelled to participate in a more fatal series of triumphs.  For alas, the victim had tied himself to the apron-string of “Madam League,” and was paraded by her, in triumph, before the eyes of his own subjects and of the world.  The passage of the Loire by the auxiliaries was resisted; a series of petty victories was gained by Guise, and, at last, after it was obvious that the leaders of the legions had been corrupted with Spanish ducats, Henry allowed them to depart, rather than give the Balafre opportunity for still farther successes.

Then came the triumph in Paris—­hosannahs in the churches, huzzas in the public places—­not for the King, but for Guise.  Paris, more madly in love with her champion than ever, prostrated herself at his feet.  For him paeans as to a deliverer.  Without him the ark would have fallen into the hands of the Philistines.  For the Valois, shouts of scorn from the populace, thunders from the pulpit, anathemas from monk and priest, elaborate invectives from all the pedants of the Sorbonne, distant mutterings of excommunication from Rome—­not the toothless beldame of modern days, but the avenging divinity of priest-rid monarchs.  Such were the results of the edicts of June.  Spain and the Pope had trampled upon France, and the populace in her capital clapped their hands and jumped for joy.  “Miserable country miserable King,” sighed an illustrious patriot, “whom his own countrymen wish rather to survive, than to die to defend him!  Let the name of Huguenot and of Papist be never heard of more.  Let us think only of the counter-league.  Is France to be saved by opening all its gates to Spain?  Is France to be turned out of France, to make a lodging for the Lorrainer and the Spaniard?” Pregnant questions, which could not yet be answered, for the end was not yet.  France was to become still more and more a wilderness.  And well did that same brave and thoughtful lover, of his:  country declare, that he who should suddenly awake from a sleep of twenty-five years, and revisit that once beautiful land, would deem himself transplanted to a barbarous island of cannibals.—­[Duplessis Mornay, ‘Mem.’ iv. 1-34.]