Then came a fierce struggle for Rouen, with Parma hovering ready to give battle. Again he showed his superiority to Henri Quatre as a strategist by transporting his army secretly across the Seine and escaping Henri’s threatened attack. Henri had a much larger army than Parma’s, and it was only Parma’s extraordinary skill that saved him from destruction. But now came the end of the long war; for Parma died and Henri turned Catholic. “Paris is well worth a Mass!” as he did not say. We have always been taught to consider this as an act of shameless cynicism; but there was a great deal to be said in Henri’s favour: certainly from the point of view of the twentieth century his action was the only thing that could have brought peace to his country. Though Parma was dead, Spain was still powerful and vengeful; the Catholic priests called Henri heretic, relapsed miscreant, devil and bastard, whom the soldiers knew to be a kind and generous friend, always smiling and ready to help. Gabrielle—“charmante Gabrielle,” who has given her name to a song that Henri wrote in her honour—urged him to turn Catholic, that the Pope might perhaps divorce Marguerite and let him marry Gabrielle. So Henri yielded, threw his scruples to the winds, and embraced the Old Religion; though his embrace was probably not so ardent as those which he gave to the abbesses, who more corporeally represented the faith to which he yielded. An amusing sidelight on his character is thrown by his message to Queen Elizabeth by the mouth of her supposed lover Essex, whom she had been rating soundly because he had lost too many Englishmen in Henri’s wars. The irate Virgin was so flattered by Henri’s praise of her beauty and charm that it needed all her caution and frugality to keep England from plunging single-handed into yet another great war with Spain on his behalf. Happily for us she had sense enough to keep out of it; and before her help became necessary Henri had gone to Mass. When Henri fell so shamelessly in love with Gabrielle he was thirty-five years of age, and perhaps the ordinary neurasthenia of middle age began to trouble him—that cause of so much marital unhappiness and so many divorces. But, if any one woman could be said to have captured his heart, it was undoubtedly Gabrielle. I once read an account of her written by a lady, possibly unmarried. Anyhow, none would have guessed from this extremely proper description that she was Henri’s official mistress; the good lady seems never to have heard of a man being anything but a woman’s husband. Gabrielle was rather ample of figure—Henri seems to have liked his women fat—and had deep blue eyes and golden hair. Her face was kind and smiling, her manner gentle; before she fell in love with Henri her morals had been, to say the least, unconventional; after she admitted the king to her friendship she continued her relations with the lover who had innocently introduced her to this more enterprising king. She