[126] A marriage really indissoluble in itself,
and for the heart of Colombe sacramental, as he came afterwards to
understand--for his own conscience at the moment, the transaction
seemed to have but the transitoriness, as also the guilt of a vagrant
love. A connexion so light of motive, so inexpressive of what seemed
the leading forces of his character, he might, but for the sorrow
which stained its actual issue, have regarded finally as a mere
mistake, or an unmeaning accident in his career.
Coligni lay suffering in the fiery August from the shot of the
ambiguous assassin which had missed his heart, amid the real or
feigned regrets of the Guises, of the royal family, of his true
friends, wondering as they watched whether the bullet had been a
poisoned one. The other Huguenot leaders had had their warnings to
go home, as the princes of the house of Navarre, Conde and Henry of
Bearn, would fain have done--the gallant world about them being come
just now to have certain suspicious resemblances to a prison or a
trap. Under order of the king the various quarters of Paris had been
distributed for some unrevealed purpose of offence or defence.
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