The death of Conde gave to the battle of Jarnac an importance not its own.  A popular ditty of the day called that prince “the great enemy of the mass.”  “His end,” says the Duke of Aumale, “was celebrated by the Catholics as a deliverance; a solemn Te Deum was chanted at court and in all the churches of France.  The flags taken were sent to Rome, where Pope Pius IV. went with them in state to St. Peter’s.  As for the Duke of Anjou, he showed his joy and his baseness together by the ignoble treatment he caused to be inflicted upon the remains of his vanquished relative, a prince of the blood who had fallen sword in hand.  At the first rumor of Conde’s death, the Duke of Montpensier’s secretary, Coustureau, had been despatched from headquarters with Baron de Magnac to learn the truth of the matter.  ‘We found him there,’ he relates, ’laid upon an ass; the said sir baron took him by the hair of the head for to lift up his face, which he had turned towards the ground, and asked me if I recognized him.  But as he had lost an eye from his head, he was mightily disfigured; and I could say no more than it was certainly his figure and his hair, and further than that I was unable to speak.’  Meanwhile,” continues the Duke of Aumale, “the accounts of those present removed all doubt; and the corpse, thus thrown across an ass, with arms and legs dangling, was carried to Jarnac, where the Duke of Anjou lodged on the evening of the battle.  There the body of Conde was taken down amidst the sobs of some Protestant prisoners, who kissed, as they wept, the remains of their gallant chief.  This touching spectacle did not stop the coarse ribaldry of the Duke of Anjou and his favorites; and for two days the prince’s remains were left in a ground-floor room, there exposed to the injurious action of the air and, to the gross insults of the courtiers.  The Duke of Anjou at last consented to give up the body of Conde to the Duke of Longueville, his brother-in-law, who had it interred with due respect at Vendome in the burial-place of his ancestors.”

When in 1569 he thus testified, from a mixture of hatred and fear, an ignoble joy at the death of Louis de Conde, the valiant chief of Protestantism, the Duke of Anjou did not foresee that, nearly twenty years later, in 1588, when he had become Henry III., King of France, he would also testify, still from a mixture of hatred and fear, the same ignoble joy at sight of the corpse of Henry de Guise, the valiant chief of Catholicism, murdered by his order and in his palace.

As soon as Conde’s death was known at La Rochelle, the Queen of Navarre, Jeanne d’Albret, hurried to Tonnay-Charente, whither the Protestant army had fallen back; she took with her her own son Henry, fifteen years old, and Henry de Bourbon, the late Prince of Conde’s son, who was seventeen; and she presented both of them to the army.  The younger, the future Henry IV., stepped forward briskly.  “Your cause,” said he, “is mine; your interests