Scott, however, willfully carved history to suit the purposes of

his story; and in these days we have come to feel that a story must

earn a certain amount of credibility by being in keeping with

established facts, even if striking events have to be sacrificed,

and that the order of time must be preserved. In Shakespeare's

days, or even in Scott's, it might have been possible to bring

Henry III. and his mignons to due punishment within the limits of

a tale beginning with the Massacre of St. Bartholomew; but in 1868

the broad outlines of tragedy must be given up to keep within the

bounds of historical verity.

How far this has been done, critics better read than myself must

decide. I have endeavoured to speak fairly, to the best of my

ability, of such classes of persons as fell in with the course of

the narrative, according to such lights as the memoirs of the time

afford. The Convent is scarcely a CLASS portrait, but the

condition of it seems to be justified by hints in the Port Royal

memoirs, respecting Maubuisson and others which Mere Angelique

reformed. The intolerance of the ladies at Montauban is described

in Madame Duplessis-Mornay's life; and if Berenger's education and

opinions are looked on as not sufficiently alien from Roman

Catholicism, a reference to Froude's 'History of Queen Elizabeth'

will show both that the customs of the country clergy, and likewise

that a broad distinction was made by the better informed among the

French between Calvinism and Protestantism or Lutheranism, in which

they included Anglicanism. The minister Gardon I do not consider

as representing his class. He is a POSSIBILITY modified to serve

the purposes of the story.

Into historical matters, however, I have only entered so far as my

story became involved with them. And here I have to apologize for

a few blunders, detected too late for alteration even in the

volumes. Sir Francis Walsingham was a young rising statesman in

1572, instead of the elderly sage he is represented; his daughter

Frances was a mere infant, and Sir Philip Sidney was not knighted

till much later. For the rest, I have tried to show the scenes

that shaped themselves before me as carefully as I could; though of

course they must not be a presentiment of the times themselves, but

of my notion of them.

C. M. Yonge November 14th, 1868




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