An assembly, in which sat a
multitude of priests and prelates, was obliged to suffer this
indignity at its door. The author was not sent to the galleys, nor the
players to the house of correction. Not long after this exhibition,
those players came forward to the Assembly to claim the rites of
that very religion which they had dared to expose, and to show their
prostituted faces in the senate, whilst the archbishop of Paris, whose
function was known to his people only by his prayers and benedictions,
and his wealth only by his alms, is forced to abandon his house and to
fly from his flock (as from ravenous wolves) because, truly, in the
sixteenth century, the cardinal of Lorraine was a rebel and a
murderer.*
* This is on the supposition of the truth of the story, but he was
not in France at the time. One name serves as well as another.
Such is the effect of the perversion of history by those who,
for the same nefarious purposes, have perverted every other part of
learning. But those who will stand upon that elevation of reason which
places centuries under our eye and brings things to the true point
of comparison, which obscures little names and effaces the colors of
little parties, and to which nothing can ascend but the spirit and
moral quality of human actions, will say to the teachers of the Palais
Royal: The cardinal of Lorraine was the murderer of the sixteenth
century, you have the glory of being the murderers in the
eighteenth, and this is the only difference between you.
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