But one other thing, more important than the anointment at Chartres, was wanting.  He did not possess the capital of his kingdom the League were still masters of Paris.  Uneasy masters of their situation; but not so uneasy, however, as they ought to have been.  The great leaders of the party, the Duke of Mayenne, his mother the Duchess of Nemours, his sister the Duchess of Montpensier, and the Duke of Feria, Spanish ambassador, were within its walls, a prey to alarm and discouragement.  “At breakfast,” said the Duchess of Montpensier, “they regale us with the surrender of a hamlet, at dinner of a town, at supper of a whole province.”  The Duchess of Nemours, who desired peace, exerted herself to convince her son of all their danger.  “Set your affairs in order,” she said;—­if you do not begin to make your arrangements with the king before leaving Paris, you will lose this capital.  I know that projects are already afoot for giving it up, and that those who can do it, and in whom you have most confidence, are accomplices and even authors of the plot.”  Mayenne himself did not hide from his confidants the gravity of the mischief and his own disquietude.  “Not a day,” he wrote on the 4th of February, 1594, to the Marquis of Montpezat, “but brings some trouble because of the people’s yearning for repose, and of the weakness which is apparent on our side.  I stem and stop this forment with as much courage as I can; but the present mischief is overwhelming; the King of Navarre will in a few days have an army of twenty thousand men, French as well as foreigners.  What will become of us, if we have not wherewithal not only to oppose him, but to make him lose the campaign?  I can tell you of a verity that, save for my presence, Paris would have already been lost because of the great factions there are in it, which I take all the pains in the world to disperse and break up, and also because of the small aid, or rather the gainsaying, I meet with from the ministers of the King of Spain.”  Mayenne tried to restore amongst the Leaguers both zeal and discipline; he convoked on the 2d of March, a meeting of all that remained of the faction of the Sixteen; he calculated upon the presence of some twelve hundred; scarcely three hundred came; he had an harangue delivered to them by the Rev. John Boucher, charged them to be faithful to the old spirit of the League, promised them that he would himself be faithful even to death, and exhorted them to be obedient in everything to Brissac, whom he had just appointed governor of the city, and to the provost of tradesmen.  On announcing to them his imminent departure for Soissons, to meet some auxiliary troops which were to be sent to him by the King of Spain, “I leave to you,” he said, “what is dearest to me in the world—­my wife, my children, my mother, and my sister.”  But when he did set out, four days afterwards, on the 6th of March, 1594, he took away his wife and his children; his mother had already warned him that