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It is a very short story, and yet it is the longest history of that Christmas that I have been able to find. I wanted to compare this celebration of Christmas, grimly intended for its desecration, with some of the celebrations which were got up with painstaking intention. But, alas, pageants leave little history, after the lights have smoked out, and the hangings have been taken away. Leaving, for the moment, King James’s Christmas and Englishmen, I thought it would be a pleasant thing to study the contrast of a Christmas in the countries where they say Christmas has its most enthusiastic welcome. So I studied up the war in the Palatinate,–I went into the chronicles of Spain, where I thought they would take pains about Christmas,–I tried what the men of “la religion,” the Huguenots, were doing at Rochelle, where a great assembly was gathering. But Christmas day would not appear in memoirs or annals. I tried Rome and the Pope, but he was dying, like the King of Spain, and had not, I think, much heart for pageantry. I looked in at Vienna, where they had all been terribly frightened by Bethlem Gabor, who was a great Transylvanian prince of those days, a sort of successful Kossuth, giving much hope to beleaguered Protestants farther west, who, I believe, thought for a time that he was some sort of seal or trumpet, which, however, he did not prove to be. At this moment of time he was retreating I am afraid, and at all events did not set his historiographer to work describing his Christmas festivities.

Passing by Bethlem Gabor then, and the rest, from mere failure of their chronicles to make note of this Christmas as it passed, I returned to France in my quest. Louis XIII. was at this time reigning with the assistance of Luynes, the short-lived favorite who preceded Richelieu. Or it would, perhaps, be more proper to say that Luynes was reigning under the name of Louis XIII. Louis XIII. had been spending the year in great activity, deceiving, thwarting, and undoing the Protestants of France. He had made a rapid march into their country, and had spread terror before him. He had had mass celebrated in Navarreux, where it had not been seen or heard in fifty years. With Bethlem Gabor in the ablative,–with the Palatinate quite in the vocative,–these poor Huguenots here outwitted and outgeneralled, and Brewster and Carver freezing out there in America, the Reformed Religion seems in a bad way to one looking at that Christmas. From his triumphal and almost bloodless campaign, King Louis returns to Paris, “and there,” says Bassompierre, “he celebrated the fetes this Christmas.” So I thought I was going to find in the memoirs of some gentleman at court, or unoccupied mistress of the robes, an account of what the most Christian King was doing, while the blisters were forming on John Carver’s hands, and while John Billington was, or was not, shooting wild turkeys on that eventful Christmas day.

But I reckoned without my king. For this is all a mistake, and whatever else is certain, it seems to be certain that King Louis XIII. did not keep either Christmas in Paris, either the Christmas of the Old Style, or that of the New. Such, alas, is history, dear friend! When you read in to-night’s “Evening Post” that your friend Dalrymple is appointed Minister to Russia, where he has been so anxious to go, do not suppose he will make you his Secretary of Legation. Alas! no; for you will read in to-morrow’s “Times” that it was all a mistake of the telegraph, and that the dispatch should have read “O’Shaughnessy,” where the dispatch looked like “Dalrymple.” So here, as I whetted my pencil, wetted my lips, and drove the attentive librarian at the Astor almost frantic as I sent him up stairs for you five times more, it proved that Louis XIII. did not spend Christmas in Paris, but that Bassompierre, who said so, was a vile deceiver. Here is the truth in the Mercure Francaise,–flattering and obsequious Annual Register of those days: