XXXIV. This is a contradiction, capable of exciting many reflexions on the uncertainty of history. If it had not happened, that an author in the situation and circumstances of Peter Petit had contradicted Peter Mathé, who would have ventured to question the prediction of la Brosse? In what author could concur superior requisites to establish a fact? A historian of reputation, who was contemporary with the event, lived in the same city with the astrologer where the tragical death of Henry happened, and who heard the prediction from the only witness who could possibly give testimony to the truth of it; and this was a man of the rank and quality of the Duke de Vendome. What further evidence could the most rigid critic demand, to engage his assent to an historical fact? With all this, unless we transfer the deception to Peter Petit, we are under a necessity of declaring, that Peter Mathé advanced a falshood; for the same circumstances equally concurred, to induce giving credit to the first as the last of them. Thus are we reduced to a necessity of acknowledging, in spite of all the critical aid we can call in to our assistance, that we are unable to ascertain the truth of this relation. Nor will transferring the deception to the Duke de Vendome, and saying, that he told one person one thing, and another another, remove the historical difficulty; for, as historians seldom relate events of which they were eye witnesses, and as the most they can do, is to make use of the testimony of credible evidences, your calling in question whether they were so or not, would, by extending to them the danger of propagating falshoods, be adding a new difficulty to the certainty of history; for at this rate, it would not suffice that an historian himself is a man of veracity; but it would be also requisite, that those from whom he had his information should be men of veracity likewise; and sometimes the intelligence passes through so many different channels, from the æra of the fact to its arrival at the pen of the historian, that it seems exceedingly improbable to suppose, that in its passage through one or other of these channels, there shall not be something added or diminished; nor can it be insured, that it shall not come to him totally changed and disfigured; for the same thing happens in this case as in morality, _malum ex quocumque defectu_. If, from one to another, a relation goes through the mouths of ten different individuals, by its passage through the mouth of one of them, who is not a scrupulous observer of the truth, it will be vitiated, and occasion its appearing corrupted in the page of history. Who, upon contemplation of this, will not be astonished at those, who believe every thing to be true as the Gospel, which they read in an author who writes the history of his own times?