Amidst all these disagreements and distractions in the very heart of Catholicism, the Reformation went on growing from day to day. In 1558, Lorenzo, the Venetian ambassador, set down even then the number of the Reformers at four hundred thousand. In 1559, at the death of Henry II., Claude Haton, a priest and contemporary chronicler on the Catholic side, calculated that they were nearly a quarter of the population of France. They held at Paris, in May, 1559, their first general synod; and eleven fully established churches sent deputies to it. This synod drew up a form of faith called the Gallican Confession, and likewise a form of discipline. “The burgess-class, for a long while so indifferent to the burnings that took place, were astounded at last at the constancy with which the pile was mounted by all those men and all those women who had nothing to do but to recant in order to save their lives. Some could not persuade themselves that people so determined were not in the right; others were moved with compassion. ‘Their very hearts,’ say contemporaries, ‘wept together with their eyes.’” It needed only an opportunity to bring these feelings out. Some of the faithful one day in the month of May, 1558, on the public walk in the Pre-aux-Clercs, began to sing the psalms of Marot. Their singing had been forbidden by the Parliament of Bordeaux, but the practice of singing those psalms had but lately been so general that it could not be looked upon as peculiar to heretics. All who happened to be there, suddenly animated by one and the same feeling, joined in with the singers, as if to protest against the punishments which were being repeated day after day. This manifestation was renewed on the following days. The King of Navarre, Anthony de Bourbon, Prince Louis de Conde, his brother, and many lords took part in it together with a crowd, it is said, of five or six thousand persons. It was not in the Pre-aux-Clercs only and by singing that this new state of mind revealed itself amongst the highest classes as well as amongst the populace. The Queen of Navarre, Jeanne d’Albret, in her early youth, “was as fond of a ball as of a sermon,” says Brantome, “and she had advised her spouse, Anthony de Bourbon, who inclined towards Calvinism, not to perplex himself with all these opinions.” In 1559 she was passionately devoted to the faith and the cause of the Reformation. With more levity, but still in sincerity, her brother-in-law, Louis de Conde, put his ambition and his courage at the service of the same cause. Admiral de Coligny’s youngest brother, Francis d’Andelot, declared himself a Reformer to Henry II. himself, who, in his wrath, threw a plate at his head, and sent him to prison in the castle of Melun. Coligny himself, who had never disguised the favorable sentiments he felt towards the Reformers, openly sided with them on the ground of his own personal faith, as well as of the justice due to them. At last the Reformation