And yet that damning coincidence of date, day
and hour apparently so exactly timed, in the famous letter to the
Governor of Lyons, by which Charles, the trap being now ready, seems
to shut all the doors upon escaping victims, is admitted even by
Huguenot historians to have been fortuitous. Gaston, recalling to
mind the actual mien of Charles as be passed to and fro across the
chimeric scene, timid, and therefore constitutionally trustful
towards older persons, filially kissing the hand of the grim Coligni-
-Mon pere! Mon pere!--all his calineries in that age of courtesy and
assassinations--would wonder always in time to come, as the more
equitable sort of historians have done, what amount of guilty
foresight the young king had carried in his bosom. And this
ambiguity regarding the nearest agent in so great a crime, adding
itself to the general mystery of life, touched Gaston duly with a
sense [119] of the dim melancholy of man's position in the world. It
might seem the function of some cruel or merely whimsical power,
thus, by the flinging of mere dust through the air, to double our
actual misfortunes.
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