Two days after Madame de Maintenon’s marriage to the king there was held within the humble walls of her little room a meeting which was destined to cause untold misery to many hundreds of thousands of people, and yet, in the wisdom of Providence, to be an instrument in carrying French arts and French ingenuity and French sprightliness among those heavier Teutonic peoples who have been the stronger and the better ever since for the leaven which they then received. For in history great evils have sometimes arisen from a virtue, and most beneficent results have often followed hard upon a crime.

The time had come when the Church was to claim her promise from madame, and her pale cheek and sad eyes showed how vain it had been for her to try and drown the pleadings of her tender heart by the arguments of the bigots around her. She knew the Huguenots of France. Who could know them better, seeing that she was herself from their stock, and had been brought up in their faith? She knew their patience, their nobility, their independence, their tenacity. What chance was there that they would conform to the king’s wish? A few great nobles might, but the others would laugh at the galleys, the jail, or even the gallows when the faith of their fathers was at stake. If their creed were no longer tolerated, then, and if they remained true to it, they must either fly from the country or spend a living death tugging at an oar or working in a chain-gang upon the roads. It was a dreadful alternative to present to a people who were so numerous that they made a small nation in themselves. And most dreadful of all, that she who was of their own blood should cast her voice against them. And yet her promise had been given, and now the time had come when it must be redeemed.

The eloquent Bishop Bossuet was there, with Louvois, the minister of war, and the famous Jesuit, Father la Chaise, each piling argument upon argument to overcome the reluctance of the king. Beside them stood another priest, so thin and so pale that he might have risen from his bed of death, but with a fierce light burning in his large dark eyes, and with a terrible resolution in his drawn brows and in the set of his grim, lanky jaw. Madame bent over her tapestry and weaved her coloured silks in silence, while the king leaned upon his hand and listened with the face of a man who knows that he is driven, and yet can hardly turn against the goads. On the low table lay a paper, with pen and ink beside it. It was the order for the revocation, and it only needed the king’s signature to make it the law of the land.

“And so, father, you are of opinion that if I stamp out heresy in this fashion I shall assure my own salvation in the next world?” he asked.

“You will have merited a reward.”

“And you think so too, Monsieur Bishop?”

“Assuredly, sire.”

“And you. Abbe du Chayla?”

The emaciated priest spoke for the first time, a tinge of colour creeping into his corpse-like cheeks, and a more lurid light in his deep-set eyes.

“I know not about assuring your salvation, sire. I think it would take very much more to do that. But there cannot be a doubt as to your damnation if you do not do it.”

The king started angrily, and frowned at the speaker.

“Your words are somewhat more curt than I am accustomed to,” he remarked.

“In such a matter it were cruel indeed to leave you in doubt. I say again that your soul’s fate hangs upon the balance. Heresy is a mortal sin. Thousands of heretics would turn to the Church if you did but give the word. Therefore these thousands of mortal sins are all upon your soul. What hope for it then, if you do not amend?”

“My father and my grandfather tolerated them.”

“Then, without some special extension of the grace of God, your father and your grandfather are burning in hell.”

“Insolent!” The king sprang from his seat.

“Sire, I will say what I hold to be the truth were you fifty times a king. What care I for any man when I know that I speak for the King of kings? See; are these the limbs of one who would shrink from testifying to truth?” With a sudden movement he threw back the long sleeves of his gown and shot out his white fleshless arms. The bones were all knotted and bent and screwed into the most fantastic shapes. Even Louvois, the hardened man of the court, and his two brother priests, shuddered at the sight of those dreadful limbs. He raised them above his head and turned his burning eyes upwards.

“Heaven has chosen me to testify for the faith before now,” said he. “I heard that blood was wanted to nourish the young Church of Siam, and so to Siam I journeyed. They tore me open; they crucified me; they wrenched and split my bones. I was left as a dead man, yet God has breathed the breath of life back into me that I may help in this great work of the regeneration of France.”

“Your sufferings, father,” said Louis, resuming his seat, “give you every claim, both upon the Church and upon me, who am its special champion and protector. What would you counsel, then, father, in the case of those Huguenots who refuse to change?”

“They would change,” cried Du Chayla, with a drawn smile upon his ghastly face. “They must bend or they must break. What matter if they be ground to powder, if we can but build up a complete Church in the land?” His deep-set eyes glowed with ferocity, and be shook one bony hand in savage wrath above his head.

“The cruelty with which you have been used, then, has not taught you to be more tender to others.”

“Tender! To heretics! No, sire, my own pains have taught me that the world and the flesh are as nothing, and that the truest charity to another is to capture his soul at all risks to his vile body. I should have these Huguenot souls, sire, though I turned France into a shambles to gain them.”

Louis was evidently deeply impressed by the fearless words and the wild earnestness of the speaker. He leaned his head upon his hand for a little time, and remained sunk in the deepest thought.

“Besides, sire,” said Pere la Chaise softly, “there would be little need for these stronger measures of which the good abbe speaks. As I have already remarked to you, you are so beloved in your kingdom that the mere assurance that you had expressed your will upon the subject would be enough to turn them all to the true faith.”

“I wish that I could think so, father; I wish that I could think so. But what is this?”

It was his valet who had half opened the door.

“Captain de Catinat is here, who desires to see you at once, sire.”

“Ask the captain to enter. Ah!” A happy thought seemed to have struck him. “We shall see what love for me will do in such a matter, for if it is anywhere to be found it must be among my own body-servants.”

The guardsman had arrived that instant from his long ride, and leaving Amos Green with the horses, he had come on at once, all dusty and travel-stained, to carry his message to the king. He entered now, and stood with the quiet ease of a man who is used to such scenes, his hand raised in a salute.

“What news, captain?”

“Major de Brissac bade me tell you, sire, that he held the Castle of Portillac, that the lady is safe, and that her husband is a prisoner.”

Louis and his wife exchanged a quick glance of relief.

“That is well,” said he. “By the way, captain, you have served me in many ways of late, and always with success. I hear, Louvois, that De la Salle is dead of the small-pox.”

“He died yesterday, sire.”

“Then I desire that you make out the vacant commission of major to Monsieur de Catinat. Let me be the first to congratulate you, major, upon your promotion, though you will need to exchange the blue coat for the pearl and gray of the mousquetaires. We cannot spare you from the household, you see.”

De Catinat kissed the hand which the monarch held out to him.

“May I be worthy of your kindness, sire!”

“You would do what you could to serve me, would you not?”

“My life is yours, sire.”

“Very good. Then I shall put your fidelity to the proof.”

“I am ready for any proof.”

“It is not a very severe one. You see this paper upon the table. It is an order that all the Huguenots in my dominions shall give up their errors, under pain of banishment or captivity. Now I have hopes that there are many of my faithful subjects who are at fault in this matter, but who will abjure it when they learn that it is my clearly expressed wish that they should do so. It would be a great joy to me to find that it was so, for it would be a pain to me to use force against any man who bears the name of Frenchman. Do you follow me?”

“Yes, sire.” The young man had turned deadly pale, and he shifted his feet, and opened and clasped his hands. He had faced death a dozen times and under many different forms, but never had he felt such a sinking of the heart as came over him now.

“You are yourself a Huguenot, I understand. I would gladly have you, then, as the first-fruit of this great measure. Let us hear from your own lips that you, for one, are ready to follow the lead of your king in this as in other things.”

The young guardsman still hesitated, though his doubts were rather as to how he should frame his reply than as to what its substance should be. He felt that in an instant Fortune had wiped out all the good turns which she had done him during his past life, and that now, far from being in her debt, he held a heavy score against her. The king arched his eyebrows and drummed his fingers impatiently as he glanced at the downcast face and dejected bearing.

“Why all this thought?” he cried. “You are a man whom I have raised and whom I will raise. He who has a major’s epaulettes at thirty may carry a marshal’s baton at fifty. Your past is mine, and your future shall be no less so. What other hopes have you?”

“I have none, sire, outside your service.”

“Why this silence, then? Why do you not give the assurance which I demand?”

“I cannot do it, sire.”

“You cannot do it!”

“It is impossible. I should have no more peace in my mind, or respect for myself, if I knew that for the sake of position or wealth I had given up the faith of my fathers.”

“Man, you are surely mad! There is all that a man could covet upon one side, and what is there upon the other?”

“There is my honour.”

“And is it, then, a dishonour to embrace my religion?”

“It would be a dishonour to me to embrace it for the sake of gain without believing in it.”

“Then believe it.”

“Alas, sire, a man cannot force himself to believe. Belief is a thing which must come to him, not he to it.”

“On my word, father,” said Louis, glancing with a bitter smile at his Jesuit confessor, “I shall have to pick the cadets of the household from your seminary, since my officers have turned casuists and theologians. So, for the last time, you refuse to obey my request?”

“Oh, sire—” De Catinat took a step forward with outstretched hands and tears in his eyes.

But the king checked him with a gesture. “I desire no protestations,” said he. “I judge a man by his acts. Do you abjure or not?”

“I cannot, sire.”

“You see,” said Louis, turning again to the Jesuit, “it will not be as easy as you think.”

“This man is obstinate, it is true, but many others will be more yielding.”

The king shook his head. “I would that I knew what to do,” said he. “Madame, I know that you, at least, will ever give me the best advice. You have heard all that has been said. What do you recommend?”

She kept her eyes still fixed upon her tapestry, but her voice was firm and clear as she answered:—

“You have yourself said that you are the eldest son of the Church. If the eldest son desert her, then who will do her bidding? And there is truth, too, in what the holy abbe has said. You may imperil your own soul by condoning this sin of heresy. It grows and flourishes, and if it be not rooted out now, it may choke the truth as weeds and briers choke the wheat.”

“There are districts in France now,” said Bossuet, “where a church is not to be seen in a day’s journey, and where all the folk, from the nobles to the peasants, are of the same ac............