calumnies alleged against me, which is of more consequence to me than hearing mass.”  He did not attempt to conceal his antipathy towards the Guises, and the part he had taken in the hostilities directed against them.  An officer, to whom permission had been given to converse with him in presence of his custodians, told him “that an appointment (accommodation) with the Duke of Guise would not be an impossibility for him.”  “Appointment between him and me!” answered Conde:  “it can only be at the point of the lance.”  The Duchess Renee of Ferrara, daughter of Louis XII., having come to France at this time, went to Orleans to pay her respects to the king.  The Duke of Guise was her son-in-law, and she reproached him bitterly with Conde’s trial.  “You have just opened,” said she, “a wound which will bleed a long while; they who have dared to attack persons of the blood royal have always found it a bad job.”  The prince asked to see, in the presence of such persons as the king might appoint, his wife, Eleanor of Roye, who, from the commencement of the trial, “solicited this favor night and day, often throwing herself on her knees before the king with tears incredible; but the Cardinal of Lorraine, fearing lest his Majesty should be moved with compassion, drove away the princess most rudely, saying that, if she had her due, she would herself be placed in the lowest dungeon.”  For them of Guise the princess was a thorn in the flesh, for she lacked not wits, or language, or courage, insomuch that they had some discussion about making away with her. [Memoires de Castelnau, p. 119; Histoire de l’Etat de France, Cant de la Republique que de la Religion, sous Francois II., by L. Regnier, Sieur de la Planche.] She demanded that at any rate able lawyers might act as counsel for her husband.  Peter Robert and Francis de Marillac, advocates of renown in the Parliament of Paris, were appointed by the king for that purpose, but their assistance proved perfectly useless; on the 26th of November, 1560, the Prince of Conde was sentenced to death; and the sentence was to be carried out on the 10th of December, the very day of the opening of the states-general.  Most of the historians say that, when it came to the question of signing it, three judges only, Chancellor de l’Hospital, the councillor of state, Duportail, and the aged Count of Sancerre, Louis de Bueil, refused to put their names to it.  “For my part,” says the scrupulous De Thou, “I can see nothing quite certain as to all that.  I believe that the sentence of death was drawn up and not signed.  I remember to have heard it so said a long while afterwards by my father, a truthful and straightforward man, to whom this form of sentence had always been distasteful.”