Towards the middle of the seventeenth century, it began to seem that the differences between Protestant and Catholic in France might soon be settled, and that the great division between Christians, little more than a century old, could be healed. That hope faded, but the Bishop of Meaux was one of those who, having caught it in his student days, never entirely lost it, and whose work for re-union, which made him the greatest Christian peacemaker in Europe, remains as a point of departure for all those who set the same hope before them today.