The next day but one, in fact, on the 18th of October, at the second session of the states-general, “the edict of July 21 was read and published with the greatest solemnity; the king swore to maintain it in terms calculated to dissipate all anxieties on the part of the Catholics.  The deputies swore after him.  The Archbishop of Bourges delivered an address on the sanctity of oaths, and those present began to think the session over, when the king rose a second time to recommend the deputies not to leave Blois before the papers were drawn up and the ordinances made.  He reminded them that at the last assembly of the states the suggestions and counsels of the three estates had been so ill carried out that, instead of a reformation and an establishment of good laws, everything had been thrown into confusion.  Accordingly the king added to this suggestion a solemn oath that he would not budge from the city until he had made an edict, sacred and inviolable.  The enthusiasm of the deputies was at its height; a rush took place to the church of St. Sauveur to chant a Te Deum.  All the princes were there to give thanks to God.  Never were king, court, and people so joyous.”  The Duke of Guise wrote to the Spanish ambassador, “At length we have, in full assembly of the states, had our edict of union solemnly sworn and established as fundamental law of this realm, having surmounted all the difficulties and hinderances which the king was pleased to throw in the way; I found myself four or five times on the point of rupture:  but I was verily assisted by so many good men.”

After as well as before the opening of the states-general, the friends of the Duke of Guise were far from having, all of them, the same confidence that he had in his position and in his success.  “Stupid owl of a Lorrainer!” said Sieur de Vins, commanding, on behalf of the League, in Dauphiny, on reading the duke’s despatches, “has he so little sense as to believe that a king whose crown he, by dissimulating, has been wanting to take away, is not dissimulating in turn to take away his life?” “As they are so thick together,” said M. de Vins’ sister, when she knew that the Duke of Guise was at Blois with the king, “you will hear, at the very first opportunity, that one or the other has killed his fellow.”  Guise himself was no stranger to this idea.  “We are not without warnings from all quarters that there is a design of attempting my life,” he wrote on the 21st of September, 1588:  “but I have, thank God, so provided against it, both by the gathering I have made of a good number of my friends, and in having, by presents and money, secured a portion of those whose services are relied upon for the execution of it, that, if once things begin, I shall finish more roughly than I did at Paris.”