This resolution was joined with another, which rendered the first not difficult to execute. With all her art, with all her skill, with all her knowledge of human character, and with all her insight into that of St. Real, Madame de Montpensier had overreached herself. She had been able to comprehend and appreciate the simplicity and purity with which he was attached to Eugenie de Menancourt, without perceiving the nature of his own feelings; but the quality of her own mind prevented her from comprehending the deep firmness of principle which existed in his heart, and from foreseeing the means that principle would take to combat love as soon as ever the progress of the insidious enemy was discovered. The proposal that she had made to him had produced upon the mind of St. Real an effect the most directly opposite to that which she had intended. The character of the Duke of Mayenne St. Real could not but esteem: there was a dignity, a generosity, a frankness about it, which, together with his splendid talents, commanded no small admiration; and had St. Real been convinced that his opposition to his king, that his bold rebellion, that even his connexion with a party, factious, turbulent, and depraved, originated in motives of patriotism and virtue, his views of the League might have been modified by his opinion of the leader, and his ultimate conduct determined by the judgment he might form in regard to whether that leader's efforts would, or would not, be ultimately beneficial to his country. In the course of that night, however, he had heard and seen enough to convince him that the passion of Mayenne was ambition, and that his object was his own aggrandizement; and the only hold, therefore, that the League could have had upon St. Real would have been virtue, honour, and patriotism, in the whole, considered as a party. The question, therefore, with the young Marquis had now become, whether the League did, or did not, possess such qualities. At the Jacobins, on the preceding night, however, he had witnessed the means employed by those who were considered the holiest men amongst them to obtain ends which he could not doubt were treacherous and bloody: that very night it had been calmly proposed to him, as a bribe to attach him to the party of the League, to betray his cousin's confidence, and to gratify his own passions at the expense of his honour and integrity. In his examination of the city during the day, he had seen the high and the noble demeaning themselves to court popularity by fawning on persons they despised--an irrefragable proof that their own designs were base; he had seen the good and the just in the filthy and unsparing hands of villains and plunderers; and he had seen those who professed to be the ministers of a God of peace armed to promote a civil war and to shed the blood of their fellow-creatures!