From the moment when Marie Stuart is a prisoner, when we see her crushed, deprived of all that comforts and consoles, infirm, alas! with whitened hair before her time, when we hear her, in the longest and most remarkable of her letters to Elizabeth (November 8, 1582), repeating for the twentieth time: “Your prison, without right, without just grounds, has already so destroyed my body that you will soon see an end if this lasts much longer; so that my enemies have no great time to satisfy their cruelty against me; nought remains to me but my soul, the which it is not in your power to render captive,”--when we dwell on this mixture of pride and plaint, pity carries us along; our hearts speak; the tender charm with which she was endowed, and which acted upon all who approached her, asserts its power and lays its spell upon us even at this distance. It is not by the text of a scribe, nor yet with the logic of a statesman that we judge her; it is with the heart of a knight, or rather, let me say, with that of a man. Humanity, pity, religion, supreme poetic grace, all those invincible and immortal powers feel themselves concerned in her person and cry to us across the ages. “Bear these tidings,” she said to her old Melvil at the moment of death: “that I die firm in my religion, a true Catholic, a true Scotchwoman, a true Frenchwoman.” These beliefs, these patriotisms and nationalities thus evoked by Marie Stuart have made that long echo that replies to her with tears and love. What reproach can we make to one who, after nineteen years of anguish and moral torture, searched, during the night that preceded her death, in the “Lives of the Saints” (which her ladies were accustomed to read to her nightly) for some great sinner whom God had pardoned. She stopped at the story of the penitent thief, which seemed to her the most reassuring example of human confidence and divine mercy; and while Jean Kennedy, one of her ladies, read it to her, she said: “He was a great sinner, but not so great as I. I implore our Lord, in memory of His Passion, to remember and have mercy upon me, as He had upon him, in the hour of death.” Those true and sincere feelings, that contrite humility in her last and sublime moments, this perfect intelligence, and profound need of pardon, leave us without means of seeing any stain of the past upon her except through tears. It was thus that old Étienne Pasquier felt. Having to relate in his “Recherches” the death of Marie Stuart, he compares it with the tragic history of the Connétable de Saint-Pol, and that of the Connétable de Bourbon, which left him under a mixture of conflicting sentiments. “But in that of which I now discourse,” he says, “methinks I see only tears; and is there, by chance, a man who, reading this, will not forgive his eyes?”