as a calm after a tempest, you reject it?  Do you hold words less acceptable than blows?  Do you prefer the sword to the hand of friendship?  Be it even as you will then.  If friendship does not content you we will try the sword, for clemency exerted beyond a certain limit degenerates into weakness.  You shall have no reason to deem your rulers either feeble or cowardly.  You have here and now defied me, and I accept the defiance.  Do you desire to know how I respond?  It is thus.  In the name of the King my son and in my own, in the name of my offended dignity and in the name of France, I, in my turn, declare the most stringent and unsparing war against rebellion, be it the work of whom it may.  Neither high blood nor ancient title shall suffice to screen a traitor; war, war to the death, shall be henceforward my battle-cry against the malcontents who are striving to decimate the nation; and do not delude yourselves with the belief that I shall be single-handed in the struggle, for I will call the people to my aid, and the people will maintain the cause of their sovereigns.  We will try our strength at last, and the strife will be a memorable one; our sons shall relate it with awe and terror to their descendants, and it will be a tale of shame which will cleave to your names for centuries to come.  Ah, gentlemen, the rule of a woman has rendered you over-bold; and you have forgotten that there have been women who have wielded a sceptre of iron.  Look to England—­is there no sterner lesson to be learnt there?  Or think you that Marie de Medicis fears to emulate Elizabeth?  You have mistaken both yourselves and me.  My forbearance has not hitherto grown out of fear; but the lion sometimes disdains to struggle with the tiger, not because he misdoubts his own strength, but because he cares not to lavish it idly.  I also feel my strength, and when the fitting moment comes, it shall be put forth.  To your war-cry I will answer with my war-cry; to your leaders I will oppose my leaders; and when you shout Conde and Mayenne!  I will answer triumphantly Louis de France and Gaston d’Orleans!  Draw the sword of rebellion if it be too restless to remain in the scabbard; you will not find me shrink from the flash of steel; and should you take the field I will be there to meet you.  Rally your chiefs; the array can have no terrors for me, prepared as I am to confront you with some of the best and the bravest in all France.  Deny this if you can, you who seek to undermine the throne, and to sacrifice the nation to your own ambitious egotism, and I will confound you with the names of Guise, Montmorency, Brissac, Sully, Bassompierre, Lesdiguieres, Marillac, and Ornano; these, and many more of the great captains of the age, will peal out my war-cry, and rally round the threatened throne of their legitimate sovereign.  My son will be in the midst of them; and mark me well, gentlemen, the struggle shall no sooner have commenced than every pampered adventurer who has poisoned the ear of the monarch, and steeled his heart against his mother, shall be crushed under her heel; and should he dare to raise his head, I will assign to him as his armour-bearer the executioner of Paris.”