It was with this view that courts of honour were instituted, in which the marshals of France sat as supreme judges, and, after due investigation, ordered that such satisfaction should be given as the case might require, in addition to the penalty of incarceration, fine, or banishment, according to the nature of the provocation; and in various instances guards were sent to the houses of the offenders guilty of a contempt of court, who were obliged to maintain them for a considerable length of time. Although the institution of courts of honour, composed of the marshals of France, is attributed to Louis XIV, a similar enactment took place in 1566, in the reign of Charles IX. In theory, nothing could be more plausible than these enactments. They were received by the nation with that enthusiasm which usually attends upon any innovation; even the Academy granted a prize-medal to the author of a successful poem on the abolition of duelling. In practice, however, the law was far from attaining its desirable end. The prejudices and false views of honour had too long prevailed to be easily eradicated, and human passions sought every possible expedient to elude these wise and humane provisions; it might also have been easily foreseen, that, the novelty of the proceedings of the court of honour once having ceased to be popular, the judges themselves, being soldiers, punctilious on such points, which from early youth they had considered as demanding the satisfaction of an appeal to arms, gradually relaxed. It must also be considered that the sovereign himself was a warlike prince, who had imbibed similar ideas from his early days; and moreover, as has been very justly observed, that, while he thus fulminated his royal anathema against duelling, he issued patents to fencing-masters to allow them to exercise their craft. The courtier well knew, that, if he screened himself from resenting an injury under the sanction of the law of the land, the laws of society would brand him as a coward, and the sovereign himself would withdraw his countenance in court and camp. Nor can we be surprised at the difficulty of checking these excesses, which were incessantly fomented by civil and religious discord; such was the hostility that prevailed amongst churchmen and their followers, that processions of religious bodies not only frequently attacked each other in the streets with the most virulent language, but actually came to blows, and fought with crucifixes, banners, and censers in Notre Dame and the holy chapel, pelting each other with prayer-books and missals,--a combat that Boileau has ludicrously described in his “Lutrin;” it was observed that the most serious ecclesiastical fray of this nature took place in the church of Notre Dame, on the very day when Louis XIII. placed the kingdom under the special protection of the Virgin Mary.