In that old dream-land of the Iliad such darkness is the work of a
propitiable deity, and withdrawn at its pleasure; in life, it often
persists obstinately. It was so with the agents on the terrible Eve
of St. Bartholomew, 1572, when a man's foes were those of his own
household. An ambiguity of motive and influence, a confusion of
spirit amounting, as we approach the centre of action, to physical
madness, encompasses [117] those who are formally responsible for
things; and the mist around that great crime, or great "accident," in
which the gala weather of Gaston's coming to Paris broke up, leaving
a sullenness behind it to remain for a generation, has never been
penetrated. The doubt with which Charles the Ninth would seem to
have left the world, doubt as to his own complicity therein, as well
as to the precise nature, the course and scope, of the event itself,
is still unresolved. So it was with Gaston also. The incident in
his life which opened for him the profoundest sources of regret and
pity, shaped as it was in a measure by those greater historic
movements, owed its tragic significance there to an unfriendly shadow
precluding knowledge how certain facts had really gone, a shadow
which veiled from others a particular act of his and the true
character of its motives.
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