During these disputes amongst the civil functionaries, and continuing all the while to make proposals for a general truce, Henry IV. vigorously resumed warlike operations, so as to bring pressure upon his adversaries and make them perceive the necessity of accepting the solution he offered them.  He besieged and took the town of Dreux, of which the castle alone persisted in holding out.  He cut off the provisions which were being brought by the Marne to Paris.  He kept Poitiers strictly invested.  Lesdiguieres defeated the Savoyards and the Spaniards in the valleys of Dauphiny and Piedmont.  Count Mansfeld was advancing with a division towards Picardy; but at the news that the king was marching to encounter him, he retired with precipitation.  From the military as well as the political point of view, there is no condition worse than that of stubbornness mingled with discouragement.  And that was the state of Mayenne and the League.  Henry IV. perceived it, and confidently hurried forward his political and military measures.  The castle of Dreux was obliged to capitulate.  Thanks to the four thousand Swiss paid for him by the Grand Duke of Florence, to the numerous volunteers brought to him by the noblesse of his party, “and to the sterling quality of the old Huguenot phalanx, folks who, from father to son, are familiarized with death,” says D’Aubigne, Henry IV. had recovered, in June, 1593, so good an army that “by means of it,” he wrote to Ferdinand de’ Medici, “I shall be able to reduce the city of Paris in so short a time as will cause you great contentment.”  But he was too judicious and too good a patriot not to see that it was not by an indefinitely prolonged war that he would be enabled to enter upon definitive possession of his crown, and that it was peace, religious peace, that he must restore to France in order to really become her king.  He entered resolutely, on the 15th of July, 1593, upon the employment of the moral means which alone could enable him to attain this end; he assembled at Mantes the conference of prelates and doctors, Catholic and Protestant, which he had announced as the preface to his conversion.  He had previously, on the 13th of May, given assurance to the Protestants as to their interests by means of a declaration on the part of eight amongst the principal Catholic lords attached to his person who undertook, “with his Majesty’s authorization, that nothing should be done in the said assemblies to the prejudice of friendly union between the Catholics who recognized his Majesty and them of the religion, or contrary to the edicts of pacification.”  On the 21st of July, the prelates and doctors of the conference transferred themselves from Mantes to St. Denis.  On Friday, July 23, in the morning, Henry wrote to Gabriel le d’Estrees, “Sunday will be the day when I shall make the summerset that brings down the house” (le, saut perilleux).  A few hours after using such flippant language to his favorite, he was having a long conference with