Corruption and intrigue ran riot at the court. Factious nobles, bishops,
and cardinals, with no God but pleasure and ambition, contended around
the throne or the sick-bed of the futile King. Catherine de Medicis,
with her stately form, her mean spirit, her bad heart, and her
fathomless depths of duplicity, strove by every subtle art to hold the
balance of power among them. The bold, pitiless, insatiable Guise, and
his brother the Cardinal of Lorraine, the incarnation of falsehood,
rested their ambition on the Catholic party. Their army was a legion of
priests, and the black swarms of countless monasteries, who by the
distribution of alms held in pay the rabble of cities and starving
peasants on the lands of impoverished nobles. Montmorency, Conde, and
Navarre leaned towards the Reform,--doubtful and inconstant chiefs,
whose faith weighed light against their interests. Yet, amid
vacillation, selfishness, weakness, treachery, one great man was like a
tower of trust, and this was Gaspar de Coligny.

Firm in his convictions, steeled by perils and endurance, calm,
sagacious, resolute, grave even to severity, a valiant and redoubted
soldier, Coligny looked abroad on the gathering storm and read its
danger in advance. He saw a strange depravity of manners; bribery and
violence overriding justice; discontented nobles, and peasants ground
down with taxes. In the midst of this rottenness, the Calvinistic
churches, patient and stern, were fast gathering to themselves the
better life of the nation. Among and around them tossed the surges of
clerical hate. Luxurious priests and libertine monks saw their disorders
rebuked by the grave virtues of the Protestant zealots. Their broad
lands, their rich endowments, their vessels of silver and of gold, their
dominion over souls,--in itself a revenue,--were all imperiled by
the growing heresy. Nor was the Reform less exacting, less intolerant,
or, when its hour came, less aggressive than the ancient faith. The