The Guises, on their side, were endeavoring to gain over Antoine de Bourbon, king of Navarre, a weak prince; a manoeuvre which his wife, Jeanne d’Albret, instructed by de Beze, allowed to succeed.  The difficulties were plain to Catherine, whose dawning power needed a period of tranquillity.  She therefore impatiently awaited Calvin’s reply to the message which the Prince de Conde, the king of Navarre, Coligny, d’Andelot, and the Cardinal de Chatillon had sent him through de Beze and Chaudieu.  Meantime, however, she was faithful to her promises as to the Prince de Conde.  The chancellor put an end to the proceedings in which Christophe was involved by referring the affair to the Parliament of Paris, which at once set aside the judgment of the committee, declaring it without power to try a prince of the blood.  The Parliament then reopened the trial, at the request of the Guises and the queen-mother.  Lasagne’s papers had already been given to Catherine, who burned them.  The giving up of these papers was a first pledge, uselessly made by the Guises to the queen-mother.  The Parliament, no longer able to take cognizance of those decisive proofs, reinstated the prince in all his rights, property, and honors.  Christophe, released during the tumult at Orleans on the death of the king, was acquitted in the first instance, and appointed, in compensation for his sufferings, solicitor to the Parliament, at the request of his godfather Monsieur de Thou.

The Triumvirate, that coming coalition of self-interests threatened by Catherine’s first acts, was now forming itself under her very eyes.  Just as in chemistry antagonistic substances separate at the first shock which jars their enforced union, so in politics the alliance of opposing interests never lasts.  Catherine thoroughly understood that sooner or later she should return to the Guises and combine with them and the Connetable to do battle against the Huguenots.  The proposed “colloquy” which tempted the vanity of the orators of all parties, and offered an imposing spectacle to succeed that of the coronation and enliven the bloody ground of a religious war which, in point of fact, had already begun, was as futile in the eyes of the Duc de Guise as in those of Catherine.  The Catholics would, in one sense be worsted; for the Huguenots, under pretext of conferring, would be able to proclaim their doctrine, with the sanction of the king and his mother, to the ears of all France.  The Cardinal de Lorraine, flattered by Catherine into the idea of destroying the heresy by the eloquence of the Church, persuaded his brother to consent; and thus the queen obtained what was all-essential to her, six months of peace.