Works of Honore De Balzac

by Honoré de Balzac

  After this terrible tirade, the three marched on in silence till they entered the little place Saint-Pierre and turned toward the pastor’s house. On the second story of that house (never noted, and of which in these days no one is ever told in Geneva, where, it may be remarked, Calvin has no statue) his lodging consisted of three chambers with common pine floors and wainscots, at the end of which were the kitchen and the bedroom of his woman-servant. The entrance, as usually happened in most of the burgher households of Geneva, was through the kitchen, which opened into a little room with two windows, serving as parlor, salon, and dining-room. Calvin’s study, where his thought had wrestled with suffering for the last fourteen years, came next, with the bedroom beyond it. Four oaken chairs covered with tapestry and placed around a square table were the sole furniture of the parlor. A stove of white porcelain, standing in one corner of the room, cast out a gentle heat. Panels and a wainscot of pine wood left in its natural state without decoration covered the walls. Thus the nakedness of the place was in keeping with the sober and simple life of the Reformer.

  “Well?” said de Beze as they entered, profiting by a few moments when Chaudieu left them to put up the horse at a neighboring inn, “what am I to do? Will you agree to the colloquy?”

  “Of course,” replied Calvin. “And it is you, my son, who will fight for us there. Be peremptory, be arbitrary. No one, neither the queen nor the Guises nor I, wants a pacification; it would not suit us at all. I have confidence in Duplessis-Mornay; let him play the leading part. Are we alone?” he added, with a glance of distrust into the kitchen, where two shirts and a few collars were stretched on a line to dry. “Go and shut all the doors. Well,” he continued when Theodore had returned, “we must drive the king of Navarre to join the Guises and the Connetable by advising him to break with Queen Catherine de’ Medici. Let us all get the benefit of that poor creature’s weakness. If he turns against the Italian she will, when she sees herself deprived of that support, necessarily unite with the Prince de Conde and Coligny. Perhaps this manoeuvre will so compromise her that she will be forced to remain on our side.”

  Theodore de Beze caught the hem of Calvin’s cassock and kissed it.

  “Oh! my master,” he exclaimed, “how great you are!”

  “Unfortunately, my dear Theodore, I am dying. If I die without seeing you again,” he added, sinking his voice and speaking in the ear of his minister of foreign affairs, “remember to strike a great blow by the hand of some one of our martyrs.”

  “Another Minard to be killed?”

  “Something better than a mere lawyer.”

  “A king?”

  “Still better! — a man who wants to be a king.”

  “The Duc de Guise!” exclaimed Theodore, with an involuntary gesture.

  “Well?” cried Calvin, who thought he saw disappointment or resistance in the gesture, and did not see at the same moment the entrance of Chaudieu. “Have we not the right to strike as we are struck? — yes, to strike in silence and in darkness. May we not return them wound for wound, and death for death? Would the Catholics hesitate to lay traps for us and massacre us? Assuredly not. Let us burn their churches! Forward, my children! And if you have devoted youths — ”

  “I have,” said Chaudieu.

  “Use them as engines of war! our cause justifies all means. Le Balafre, that horrible soldier, is, like me, more than a man; he is a dynasty, just as I am a system. He is able to annihilate us; therefore, I say, Death to the Guise!”

  “I would rather have a peaceful victory, won by time and reason,” said de Beze.

  “Time!” exclaimed Calvin, dashing his chair to the ground, “reason! Are you mad? Can reason achieve conquests? You know nothing of men, you who deal with them, idiot! The thing that injures my doctrine, you triple fool! is the reason that is in it. By the lightning of Saul, by the sword of Vengeance, thou pumpkin-head, do you not see the vigor given to my Reform by the massacre at Amboise? Ideas never grow till they are watered with blood. The slaying of the Duc de Guise will lead to a horrible persecution, and I pray for it with all my might. Our reverses are preferable to success. The Reformation has an object to gain in being attacked; do you hear me, dolt? It cannot hurt us to be defeated, whereas Catholicism is at an end if we should win but a single battle. Ha! what are my lieutenants? — rags, wet rags instead of men! white-haired cravens! baptized apes! O God, grant me ten years more of life! If I die too soon the cause of true religion is lost in the hands of such boobies! You are as great a fool as Antoine de Navarre! Out of my sight! Leave me; I want a better negotiator than you! You are an ass, a popinjay, a poet! Go and make your elegies and your acrostics, you trifler! Hence!”

  The pains of his body were absolutely overcome by the fire of his anger; even the gout subsided under this horrible excitement of his mind. Calvin’s face flushed purple, like the sky before a storm. His vast brow shone. His eyes flamed. He was no longer himself. He gave way utterly to the species of epileptic motion, full of passion, which was common with him. But in the very midst of it he was struck by the attitude of the two witnesses; then, as he caught the words of Chaudieu saying to de Beze, “The Burning Bush!” he sat down, was silent, and covered his face with his two hands, the knotted veins of which were throbbing in spite of their coarse texture.

  Some minutes later, still shaken by this storm raised within him by the continence of his life, he said in a voice of emotion: —

  “My sins, which are many, cost me less trouble to subdue, than my impatience. Oh, savage beast! shall I never vanquish you?” he cried, beating his breast.

  “My dear master,” said de Beze, in a tender voice, taking Calvin’s hand and kissing it, “Jupiter thunders, but he knows how to smile.”

  Calvin looked at his disciple with a softened eye and said: —

  “Understand me, my friends.”

  “I understand that the pastors of peoples bear great burdens,” replied Theodore. “You have a world upon your shoulders.”

  “I have three martyrs,” said Chaudieu, whom the master’s outburst had rendered thoughtful, “on whom we can rely. Stuart, who killed Minard, is at liberty — ”

  “You are mistaken,” said Calvin, gently, smiling after the manner of great men who bring fair weather into their faces as though they were ashamed of the previous storm. “I know human nature; a man may kill one president, but not two.”

  “Is it absolutely necessary?” asked de Beze.

  “Again!” exclaimed Calvin, his nostrils swelling. “Come, leave me, you will drive me to fury. Take my decision to the queen. You, Chaudieu, go your way, and hold your flock together in Paris. God guide you! Dinah, light my friends to the door.”

  “Will you not permit me to embrace you?” said Theodore, much moved. “Who knows what may happen to us on the morrow? We may be seized in spite of our safe-conduct.”

  “And yet you want to spare them!” cried Calvin, embracing de Beze. Then he took Chaudieu’s hand and said: “Above all, no Huguenots, no Reformers, but Calvinists! Use no term but Calvinism. Alas! this is not ambition, for I am dying, — but it is necessary to destroy the whole of Luther, even to the name of Lutheran and Lutheranism.”

  “Ah! man divine,” cried Chaudieu, “you well deserve such honors.”

  “Maintain the uniformity of the doctrine; let no one henceforth change or remark it. We are lost if new sects issue from our bosom.”

  We will here anticipate the events on which this Study is based, and close the history of Theodore de Beze, who went to Paris with Chaudieu. It is to be remarked that Poltrot, who fired at the Duc de Guise fifteen months later, confessed under torture that he had been urged to the crime by Theodore de Beze; though he retracted that avowal during subsequent tortures; so that Bossuet, after weighing all historical considerations, felt obliged to acquit Beze of instigating the crime. Since Bossuet’s time, however, an apparently futile dissertation, apropos of a celebrated song, has led a compiler of the eighteenth century to prove that the v
erses on the death of the Duc de Guise, sung by the Huguenots from one end of France to the other, was the work of Theodore de Beze; and it is also proved that the famous song on the burial of Marlborough was a plagiarism on it.[*]

  [*] One of the most remarkable instances of the transmission

  of songs is that of Marlborough. Written in the first

  instance by a Huguenot on the death of the Duc de Guise in

  1563, it was preserved in the French army, and appears to

  have been sung with variations, suppressions, and additions

  at the death of all generals of importance. When the

  intestine wars were over the song followed the soldiers into

  civil life. It was never forgotten (though the habit of

  singing it may have lessened), and in 1781, sixty years

  after the death of Marlborough, the wet-nurse of the Dauphin

  was heard to sing it as she suckled her nursling. When and

  why the name of the Duke of Marlborough was substituted for

  that of the Duc de Guise has never been ascertained. See

  “Chansons Populaires,” par Charles Nisard: Paris, Dentu,

  1867. — Tr.

  XIV. CATHERINE IN POWER

  The day on which Theodore de Beze and Chaudieu arrived in Paris, the court returned from Rheims, where Charles IX. was crowned. This ceremony, which Catherine made magnificent with splendid fetes, enabled her to gather about her the leaders of the various parties. Having studied all interests and all factions, she found herself with two alternatives from which to choose; either to rally them all to the throne, or to pit them one against the other. The Connetable de Montmorency, supremely Catholic, whose nephew, the Prince de Conde, was leader of the Reformers, and whose sons were inclined to the new religion, blamed the alliance of the queen-mother with the Reformation. The Guises, on their side, were endeavoring to gain over Antoine de Bourbon, king of Navarre, a weak prince; a manoeuvre which his wife, Jeanne d’Albret, instructed by de Beze, allowed to succeed. The difficulties were plain to Catherine, whose dawning power needed a period of tranquillity. She therefore impatiently awaited Calvin’s reply to the message which the Prince de Conde, the king of Navarre, Coligny, d’Andelot, and the Cardinal de Chatillon had sent him through de Beze and Chaudieu. Meantime, however, she was faithful to her promises as to the Prince de Conde. The chancellor put an end to the proceedings in which Christophe was involved by referring the affair to the Parliament of Paris, which at once set aside the judgment of the committee, declaring it without power to try a prince of the blood. The Parliament then reopened the trial, at the request of the Guises and the queen-mother. Lasagne’s papers had already been given to Catherine, who burned them. The giving up of these papers was a first pledge, uselessly made by the Guises to the queen-mother. The Parliament, no longer able to take cognizance of those decisive proofs, reinstated the prince in all his rights, property, and honors. Christophe, released during the tumult at Orleans on the death of the king, was acquitted in the first instance, and appointed, in compensation for his sufferings, solicitor to the Parliament, at the request of his godfather Monsieur de Thou.

  The Triumvirate, that coming coalition of self-interests threatened by Catherine’s first acts, was now forming itself under her very eyes. Just as in chemistry antagonistic substances separate at the first shock which jars their enforced union, so in politics the alliance of opposing interests never lasts. Catherine thoroughly understood that sooner or later she should return to the Guises and combine with them and the Connetable to do battle against the Huguenots. The proposed “colloquy” which tempted the vanity of the orators of all parties, and offered an imposing spectacle to succeed that of the coronation and enliven the bloody ground of a religious war which, in point of fact, had already begun, was as futile in the eyes of the Duc de Guise as in those of Catherine. The Catholics would, in one sense be worsted; for the Huguenots, under pretext of conferring, would be able to proclaim their doctrine, with the sanction of the king and his mother, to the ears of all France. The Cardinal de Lorraine, flattered by Catherine into the idea of destroying the heresy by the eloquence of the Church, persuaded his brother to consent; and thus the queen obtained what was all-essential to her, six months of peace.

  A slight event, occurring at this time, came near compromising the power which Catherine had so painfully built up. The following scene, preserved in history, took place, on the very day the envoys returned from Geneva, in the hotel de Coligny near the Louvre. At his coronation, Charles IX., who was greatly attached to his tutor Amyot, appointed him grand-almoner of France. This affection was shared by his brother the Duc d’Anjou, afterwards Henri III., another of Anjou’s pupils. Catherine heard the news of this appointment from the two Gondis during the journey from Rheims to Paris. She had counted on that office in the gift of the Crown to gain a supporter in the Church with whom to oppose the Cardinal de Lorraine. Her choice had fallen on the Cardinal de Tournon, in whom she expected to find, as in l’Hopital, another crutch — the word is her own. As soon as she reached the Louvre she sent for the tutor, and her anger was such, on seeing the disaster to her policy caused by the ambition of this son of a shoemaker, that she was betrayed into using the following extraordinary language, which several memoirs of the day have handed down to us: —

  “What!” she cried, “am I, who compel the Guises, the Colignys, the Connetables, the house of Navarre, the Prince de Conde, to serve my ends, am I to be opposed by a priestling like you who are not satisfied to be bishop of Auxerre?”

  Amyot excused himself. He assured the queen that he had asked nothing; the king of his own will had given him the office of which he, the son of a poor tailor, felt himself quite unworthy.

  “Be assured, maitre,” replied Catherine (that being the name which the two kings, Charles IX. and Henri III., gave to the great writer) “that you will not stand on your feet twenty-four hours hence, unless you make your pupil change his mind.”

  Between the death thus threatened and the resignation of the highest ecclesiastical office in the gift of the crown, the son of the shoemaker, who had lately become extremely eager after honors, and may even have coveted a cardinal’s hat, thought it prudent to temporize. He left the court and hid himself in the abbey of Saint-Germain. When Charles IX. did not see him at his first dinner, he asked where he was. Some Guisard doubtless told him of what had occurred between Amyot and the queen-mother.

  “Has he been forced to disappear because I made him grand-almoner?” cried the king.

  He thereupon rushed to his mother in the violent wrath of angry children when their caprices are opposed.

  “Madame,” he said on entering, “did I not kindly sign the letter you asked me to send to Parliament, by means of which you govern my kingdom? Did you not promise that if I did so my will should be yours? And here, the first favor that I wish to bestow excites your jealousy! The chancellor talks of declaring my majority at fourteen, three years from now, and you wish to treat me as a child. By God, I will be king, and a king as my father and grandfather were kings!”

  The tone and manner in which these words were said gave Catherine a revelation of her son’s true character; it was like a blow in the breast.

  “He speaks to me thus, he whom I made a king!” she thought. “Monsieur,” she said aloud, “the office of a king, in times like these, is a very difficult one; you do not yet know the shrewd men with whom you have to deal. You will never have a safer and more sincere friend than your mother, or better servants than those who have been so long attached to her person, without whose services you might perhaps not even exist to-day. The Guises want both your life and your throne, be sure of that. If they could sew me into a sack and fling me into the river,” she said, pointing to the Seine, “it would be done to-night. They know that I am a lioness defending her young, and that I alone prevent their daring hands from seizing your crown. To whom — to whose party does your tutor belong? Who are his allies? Wh
at authority has he? What services can he do you? What weight do his words carry? Instead of finding a prop to sustain your power, you have cut the ground from under it. The Cardinal de Lorraine is a living threat to you; he plays the king; he keeps his hat on his head before the princes of the blood; it was urgently necessary to invest another cardinal with powers greater than his own. But what have you done? Is Amyot, that shoemaker, fit only to tie the ribbons of his shoes, is he capable of making head against the Guise ambition? However, you love Amyot, you have appointed him; your will must now be done, monsieur. But before you make such gifts again, I pray you to consult me in affectionate good faith. Listen to reasons of state; and your own good sense as a child may perhaps agree with my old experience, when you really understand the difficulties that lie before you.”

  “Then I can have my master back again?” cried the king, not listening to his mother’s words, which he considered to be mere reproaches.

  “Yes, you shall have him,” she replied. “But it is not here, nor that brutal Cypierre who will teach you how to reign.”

  “It is for you to do so, my dear mother,” said the boy, mollified by his victory and relaxing the surly and threatening look stamped by nature upon his countenance.

  Catherine sent Gondi to recall the new grand-almoner. When the Italian discovered the place of Amyot’s retreat, and the bishop heard that the courtier was sent by the queen, he was seized with terror and refused to leave the abbey. In this extremity Catherine was obliged to write to him herself, in such terms that he returned to Paris and received from her own lips the assurance of her protection, — on condition, however, that he would blindly promote her wishes with Charles IX.

  This little domestic tempest over, the queen, now re-established in the Louvre after an absence of more than a year, held council with her closest friends as to the proper conduct to pursue with the young king whom Cypierre had complimented on his firmness.

  “What is best to be done?” she said to the two Gondis, Ruggiero, Birago, and Chiverni who had lately become governor and chancellor to the Duc d’Anjou.