Paris in November 1589, held by the League while the king it will not have waits outside the walls, and men who must decide what the cause is worth in their own coin. The four stories that follow leave the sixteenth century altogether for an English cathedral close - a dean, a canon's wife, a professor and an archdeacon, each handled with a perfectly straight face. Weyman failed at the bar and was briefly jailed in France as a suspected spy on holiday; he wrote historical adventure with an accuracy that irritated professional historians and delighted Stevenson. Thirty-one plates, from Jan Brueghel the Elder to Edvard Munch, trace the garden, the still life and the forge across four centuries of European painting.