his duty unflinchingly.[193] He partook sparingly of the food which was presented to him; and instead of taking rest, spent the greater portion of the night in pacing to and fro the narrow apartment.  It was evident that he had firm faith either in the royal pardon, or in the means of escape being provided for him by his friends; but as day by day went by, and he received no intelligence from without, while he remarked that every individual who entered his chamber was fully armed, and that the knives upon his table were not pointed, in order that he should be unable to convert them into defensive weapons, he became somewhat less violent; and he no sooner ascertained that Henry had refused to comply with the petition of his family than he said, with a bitter laugh:  “Ha!  I see that they wish me to take the road to the scaffold.”  Thenceforward he ceased to demand justice on his accusers, became less imperious, and even admitted that he had no rational hope save in the mercy of the monarch.[194]

On the 27th of July, the preliminary arrangements having been completed, the Marechal was conducted to the Palais de Justice by the Sieur de Montigny,[195] the Governor of Paris, in a covered barge escorted by twelve or fifteen armed men.  Previously, however, to his being put upon his trial, he was privately interrogated by the commissioners chosen for that purpose; but this last judicial effort to save him only tended to secure his ruin.  When confronted with his judges, Biron appeared to have lost all consistency of character; the soldier was sunk in the sophist; he argued vaguely and inconsistently; and compromised his own cause by the very clumsiness of the efforts which he made to clear himself.  Unaware of the revelations of La Fin, when he was confronted with him he declared him to be a man of honour, his relative, and his very good friend; but the depositions of the Burgundian noble were no sooner made known to him than he retracted his former assertion, branding him as a sorcerer, a traitor, an assassin, and the vilest of men, with other epithets too coarse for repetition.[196] These terrible accusations, however, came too late to serve his cause; he had already committed himself by his previous panegyric; and, perceiving that such was the case, he hastened to support his testimony against his former accomplice by asserting that were Renaze alive and in France, he should be able to prove the truth of what he advanced, and to justify himself.  Unfortunately for the success of this assurance, Renaze in his turn made his appearance in court; having, by a strange chance, recently escaped from Savoy, where the Duke had held him a prisoner; and Biron had the mortification of finding that this, another of his ancient allies, had not been more faithful to him in his adversity than La Fin.  These two witnesses, indeed, decided his fate; as the letters which were produced against him were proved to have been written before the previous pardon granted to him by Henry at Lyons, and they were consequently of no avail as regarded the present accusation.