l6o RENAISSANCE ARCHITECTURE IN FRANCE. 



under his brothers they became desperate under Henry III. In pro- 

 fligacy his court eclipsed all precedents. The king led the fashion for 

 degrading vices, effeminate manners and costume, trivial amusements 

 and fantastic luxury, accompanied by superstitious religious observ- 

 ances, while the precincts of his palaces were the scene of duels and 

 murders. 



The Catholic League, founded to extirpate heresy and forward the 

 ambitions of the Guises, gained control of half the kingdom and kept 

 alive the civil war for twenty years (1576-95), the struggle being waged 

 with increasing barbarity. The country was overrun by marauding 

 bands, and no man's life or property, no woman's honour was safe. In 

 1588 Henry III., driven from Paris by the League, caused Henry of 

 Guise and his brother to be assassinated at Blois, and soon after took 

 refuge with Henry of Bourbon and the Protestants. Catharine died a 

 few days after the murder, and her son's assassination six months later 

 ended the war of the three Henries. 



The King of Navarre thus became King of France as Henry IV. 

 (1589), and at length the threads of national life, tangled and rent 

 by generations of incompetence and disorder, were in firm hands able 

 to unravel them and weave them again into a strong and harmonious 

 fabric. 



CHARACTER OF PERIOD OF ANARCHY. An era of fert.ie enthu- 

 siasm and high endeavours is often followed by one of comparative 

 disillusionment and sterility. In France the reaction was hastened 

 and intensified by a prolonged anarchy, attended by demoralisation in 

 social and political life. Society indulged in the grossest profligacy. 

 Public affairs were governed by intrigue, corruption, and crime. All 

 offices were for sale. Religion was marked by increased fanaticism. 

 On one side bigotry and superstition went hand in hand with vice and 

 murder ; on the other, harsh austerity, an illiberal theology replaced the 

 ardour of the early Reformation ; and many of the ablest minds took 

 refuge in an easy-going scepticism. Montaigne's essays flow on easily 

 and without plan, preaching a philosophy of expediency. Brantome 

 strings together vivid but scandalous anecdotes, and, accepting the low 

 moral tone of his contemporary society, sees no shame in painting it to 

 the life. The eager outlook and the faith in progress of the dawning 

 Renaissance, the ordered acquirements and constructive genius of its 

 maturity had been followed by the pococurantism of its decline. Not 

 Rabelais' " Sursum corda " but Montaigne's " Que sais-je ? " was the 

 keynote of the era of Henry III. 



The process of disintegration had its counterpart in art. The pure 

 forms and ordered sequences of classical tradition ceased to satisfy the 

 jaded taste, and the artist replaced simple and straightforward forms 

 by exaggerated and abnormal types, and over-elaboration. This 



