Catherine sent Birago to Vignay to tell the chancellor (l’Hopital) to come to Orleans at once, in spite of his being in disgrace.  Birago returned the very night of which we are writing, and was now a few miles from Orleans with l’Hopital, who heartily avowed himself for the queen-mother.  Chiverni, whose fidelity was very justly suspected by the Guises, had escaped from Orleans and reached Ecouen in ten hours, by a forced march which almost cost him his life.  There he told the Connetable de Montmorency of the peril of his nephew, the Prince de Conde, and the audacious hopes of the Guises.  The Connetable, furious at the thought that the prince’s life hung upon that of Francois II., started for Orleans at once with a hundred noblemen and fifteen hundred cavalry.  In order to take the Messieurs de Guise by surprise he avoided Paris, and came direct from Ecouen to Corbeil, and from Corbeil to Pithiviers by the valley of the Essonne.

“Soldier against soldier, we must leave no chances,” he said on the occasion of this bold march.

Anne de Montmorency, who had saved France at the time of the invasion of Provence by Charles V., and the Duc de Guise, who had stopped the second invasion by the emperor at Metz, were, in truth, the two great warriors of France at this period.  Catherine had awaited this precise moment to rouse the inextinguishable hatred of the Connetable, whose disgrace and banishment were the work of the Guises.  The Marquis de Simeuse, however, who commanded at Gien, being made aware of the large force approaching under command of the Connetable, jumped on his horse hoping to reach Orleans in time to warn the duke and cardinal.

Sure that the Connetable would come to the rescue of his nephew, and full of confidence in the Chancelier l’Hopital’s devotion to the royal cause, the queen-mother revived the hopes and the boldness of the Reformed party.  The Colignys and the friends of the house of Bourbon, aware of their danger, now made common cause with the adherents of the queen-mother.  A coalition between these opposing interests, attacked by a common enemy, formed itself silently in the States-general, where it soon became a question of appointing Catherine as regent in case the king should die.  Catherine, whose faith in astrology was much greater than her faith in the Church, now dared all against her oppressors, seeing that her son was ill and apparently dying at the expiration of the time assigned to his life by the famous sorceress, whom Nostradamus had brought to her at the chateau of Chaumont.

XI

AMBROISE PARE