With the great Huguenot leaders, with the princes of
the house of Guise, and the Court, like one united family, all in
gaudy evidence in its streets, Paris, ever with an eye for the chance
of amusement, always preoccupied with the visible side of things,
always Catholic--was bidden to be tolerant for a moment, to carry no
fire-arms under penalties, "to renew no past [121] quarrels," and
draw no sword in any new one. It was the perfect stroke of
Catherine's policy, the secret of her predominance over her sons,
thus, with a flight of purchaseable fair women ever at command, to
maintain perpetual holiday, perpetual idleness, with consequent
perpetual, most often idle, thoughts about marriage, amid which the
actual conduct of affairs would be left to herself. Yet for Paris
thus Catholic, there was certainly, even if the Pope were induced to
consent, and the Huguenot bride-groom to "conform," something illicit
and inauspicious about this marriage within the prohibited degrees of
kinship. In fact, the cunningly sought papal dispensation never
came; Charles, with apparent unconcern, fulfilled his threat, and did
without it; must needs however trick the old Cardinal de Bourbon into
performing his office, not indeed "in the face of the Church," but in
the open air outside the doors of the cathedral of Notre-Dame, the
Catholics quietly retiring into the interior, when that starveling
ceremony was over, to hear the nuptial mass.
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