“O Paris who are no longer Paris but a den of ferocious beasts, a citadel of Spaniards, Walloons and Neapolitans, an asylum and safe retreat for robbers, murderers and assassins, will you never be cognizant of your dignity and remember who you have been and what you are; will you never heal yourself of this frenzy which has engendered for you in place of one lawful and gracious King fifty saucy kinglets and fifty tyrants? You are in chains, under a Spanish Inquisition a thousand times more intolerable and harder to endure by spirits born free and unconstrained as the French are than the cruelest deaths which the Spaniards could devise. You did not tolerate a slight increase of taxes and of offices and a few new edicts which did not concern you at all, yet you endure that they pillage houses, that they ransom you with blood, that they imprison your senators, that they drive out and banish your good citizens and counselors: that they hang and massacre your principal magistrates; you see it and endure it but you approve it and praise it and you would not dare or know how to do otherwise. You have given little support to your King, good-tempered, easy, friendly, who behaved like a fellow-citizen of your town which he had enriched and embellished with handsome buildings, fortified with strong and haughty ramparts, honored with privileges and favorable exemptions. What say I? Given little support? Far worse: you have driven him from his city, his house, his very bed! Driven him? you have pursued him. Pursued him? You assassinated him, canonized the assassin and made joyful over his death. And now you see how much this death profited you.” Henry of Navarre became king of Paris as well as of the rest of France though it required a considerable concession to achieve that position. Still it was not the first time that he had made a mental somersault, so when he found that Paris was stubborn in spite of more than three years and a half of hunger, sickness and death, and that his enemies outside of the city were strong enough to inflict upon him a defeat of some moment, he yielded to the urging of his counselors, admitted with a shrug “So fair a city is well worth a mass” and declared his willingness to turn Catholic. After suitably prolonged disputations with theologians he declared himself convinced of the error of his belief, and on a Sunday in July, 1593, he appeared at Saint Denis where an imposing body of prelates was arrayed before the great door, and professed his new faith. Then he was allowed to enter the building and to repeat his profession before the altar.