Now the heat of the sedition was, as everyone knows, in the neighbourhood of Angouleme, and of Bordeaux in Guienne, and other parts of the kingdom, where great battles and severe conflicts between the rebels and the royal armies was likely to take place.  The principal one which finished the war was given between Ruffec and Angouleme, where all the prisoners taken were tried and hanged.  This battle, commanded by old Bastarnay, took place in the month of November, seven months after the poisoning of Jehan.  Now the Baron knew that his head had been strongly recommended as one to be cut off, he being the right hand of Monsiegneur Louis.  Directly his men began to fall back, the old fellow found himself surrounded by six men determined to seize him.  Then he understood that they wished to take him alive, in order to proceed against his house, ruin his name, and confiscate his property.  The poor sire preferred rather to die and save his family, and present the domains to his son.  He defended himself like the brave old lion that he was.  In spite of their number, these said soldiers, seeing three of their comrades fall, were obliged to attack Bastarnay at the risk of killing him, and threw themselves together upon him, after having laid low two of his equerries and a page.

In this extreme danger an esquire wearing the arms of Rohan, fell upon the assailants like a thunderbolt, and killed two of them, crying, “God save the Bastarnays!” The third man-at-arms, who had already seized old Bastarnay, was so hard pressed by this squire, that he was obliged to leave the elder and turn against the younger, to whom he gave a thrust with his dagger through a flaw in his armour.  Bastarnay was too good a comrade to fly without assisting the liberator of his house, who was badly wounded.  With a blow of his mace he killed the man-at-arms, seized the squire, lifted him on to his horse, and gained the open, accompanied by a guide, who led him to the castle of Roche-Foucauld, which he entered by night, and found in the great room Bertha de Rohan, who had arranged this retreat for him.  But on removing the helmet of his rescuer, he recognised the son of Jehan, who expired upon the table, as by a final effort he kissed his mother, and saying in a loud voice to her—­

“Mother, we have paid the debt we owed him!”

Hearing these words, the mother clasped the body of her loved child to her heart, and separated from him never again, for she died of grief, without hearing or heeding the pardon and repentance of Bastarnay.

The strange calamity hastened the last day of the poor old man, who did not live to see the coronation of King Louis the Eleventh.  He founded a daily mass in the Church of Roche-Foucauld, where in the same grave he placed mother and son, with a large tombstone, upon which their lives are much honoured in the Latin language.

The morals which any one can deduce from this history are the most profitable for the conduct of life, since this shows how gentlemen should be courteous with the dearly beloveds of their wives.  Further, it teaches us that all children are blessings sent by God Himself, and over them fathers, whether true or false, have no right of murder, as was formerly the case at Rome, owing to a heathen and abominable law, which ill became that Christianity which makes us all sons of God.