The massacre of Saint-Bartholomew has found apologists, even at this late day,--an historical work issued by the house of Firmin-Didot, in 1898, purporting to give an impartial résumé of the acts of the League during the reigns of Henri III and Henri IV, declares that the people took part in this tragedy because "their zeal had been misled," and they believed that they were going, not to massacre, but to battle "against enemies who menaced their faith and their liberty." The League, according to this champion of the Church, M. V. de Chalambert, "was at once legitimate in its principles, energetic and sagacious in its acts, in its faith;" ... "if the family of Lorraine had the signal honor of personifying, during a space of nearly fifty years, the Catholic cause in France, it owed this honor to the faith, to the sincere zeal, and to the great qualities of its princes, not to the schemes of ambition." A more important work, the _History of the Princes of Condé_, by the Duc d'Aumale, in seven volumes, is much more impartial, though the distinguished author's sympathies are naturally enlisted in this subject. He quotes with just appreciation the answer of the young Prince of Condé, Henri de Bourbon, to Charles IX after the massacre, when the king summoned him before him and curtly gave him his choice: "_Messe, mort, ou Bastille?_" (the mass, death, or the Bastile.) "God will not permit, my king and my seigneur, that I should select the first. As for the other two, they are at your discretion, which may God temper with His Providence." "The intellectual life of the people," says the author of the _Mémoires du peuple français_, "had gained, rather than lost, amid the terrible emotions of public affairs. In the interiors of the houses, everything demonstrated that literature, the arts, the sciences, commerce, and industry were far from having succumbed during the long crises of the preceding reigns." It was during the reign of Charles IX that the beginning of the year was fixed at the first of January, by an edict issued in 1564. It had previously been considered as commencing at Easter.