The nuptial torches burned not less bright for the gloom overhanging the despised and abominated Lutherans. But in an instant, as by the touch of a magician's wand, they were turned into the funereal tapers of Henry the Second.[717]
The tournament, June 30, 1559.
Henry mortally wounded by Montgomery's lance.
His death.
On the thirtieth of June,[718] when the sports of the day were about ending, the gay monarch must needs re-enter the lists in person, and break another lance in honor of Diana of Poitiers, whose colors he wore. The queen had indeed begged him to avoid, for that day at least, the dangerous pastime; she had been terrified, so she said, by one of those strangely vivid dreams that wear, after the event, so much of the guise of prophetic sight.[719] But Henry made light of her fears, and closed his ears to her warning. His choice of an antagonist fell upon Montgomery, captain of his Scottish archers; and although the latter begged leave to decline the perilous honor, the king refused to excuse him.[720] At the appointed signal, the knights rode rapidly to the rude encounter. But Henry's visor was not proof against the lance of Montgomery, and either broke or was unclasped in the shock. The lance itself was splintered by the blow, and the piece which Montgomery, in his surprise and fright, had neglected instantly to lower, entering above the monarch's eye, penetrated far toward the brain.[721] Rescued from falling, but covered with blood, the wounded prince was hastily stripped of his armor, amid the loud lamentations of the horror-stricken spectators, and borne into the magnificent saloon of the Palais des Tournelles. Here, after lingering a few days, he died on the tenth of July.
It was a month, to the hour, since Henry's visit to parliament.[722]
The body was laid out in state in the very room appointed for the nuptial balls. A splendidly wrought tapestry representing the conversion of St. Paul hung near the remains, but the words, "Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?" embroidered upon it, admitted too pointed an application, and the cloth was soon put out of sight.[723] The public, however, needed no such pictorial reminder. The persecutor had been stopped as suddenly in his career of blood as the young Pharisee near Damascus. But it may be doubted whether the eyes with which he had sworn to see Anne du Bourg burned beheld such a vision of glory as blinded the future apostle's vision. It is more than probable, indeed, that Henry never spoke after receiving the fatal wound;[724] although the report obtained that, as he was carried from the unfortunate tilting-ground, he turned his bleeding face toward the prison in which the parliament counsellors were languishing, and expressed fear lest he had wronged them—a suggestion which the Cardinal of Lorraine hastened to answer by representing it as a temptation of the Prince of Evil.[725]
"La Façon de Genève"—the Huguenot service.
The charge of having prayed, or administered the sacrament of Baptism or of the Lord's Supper, or taken part in the celebration of Marriage, "according to the fashion of Geneva," so frequently appears in the documents of the first century after the establishment of the Reformation in France as the chief offence of its early adherents and martyrs, that it is worth while to examine in some detail the model of worship that has exerted so important an influence upon the practice of the Huguenots and their descendants down to the present time.