But the yellow-haired woman, light of soul, whose husband he
had become by dubious and [120] irregular Huguenot rites, the
religious sanction of which he hardly recognised--flying after his
last tender kiss, with the babe in her womb, from the ruins of her
home, and the slaughter of her kinsmen, supposed herself
treacherously deserted. For him, on the other hand, "the pity of
it," the pity of the thing supplied all that had been wanting in its
first consecration, and made the lost mistress really a wife. His
recoil from that damaging theory of his conduct brought home to a
sensitive conscience the fact that there had indeed been a measure of
self-indulgent weakness in his acts, and made him the creature for
the rest of his days of something like remorse.
The gaiety, the strange devils' gaiety of France, at least in all
places whither its royalty came, ended appropriately in a marriage--a
marriage of "The Reform" in the person of Prince Henry of Navarre, to
Catholicism in the person of Margaret of Valois, Margaret of the
"Memoirs," Charles's sister, in tacit defiance of, or indifference
to, the Pope.
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