“I will speak to you frankly and clearly,” he said to Pecquius, “and tell you as from myself that there is passion, and if one is willing to arrange the affair of the Princess, everything else can be accommodated and appeased.  Put if the Princess remain where she is, we are on the eve of a rupture which may set fire to the four corners of Christendom.”  Pecquius said he liked to talk roundly, and was glad to find that he had not been mistaken in his opinion, that all these commotions were only made for the Princess, and if all the world was going to war, she would be the principal subject of it.  He could not marvel sufficiently, he said, at this vehement passion which brought in its train so great and horrible a conflagration; adding many arguments to show that it was no fault of the Archdukes, but that he who was the cause of all might one day have reason to repent.

Villeroy replied that “the King believed the Princess to be suffering and miserable for love of him, and that therefore he felt obliged to have her sent back to her father.”  Pecquius asked whether in his conscience the Secretary of State believed it right or reasonable to make war for such a cause.  Villeroy replied by asking “whether even admitting the negative, the Ambassador thought it were wisely done for such a trifle, for a formality, to plunge into extremities and to turn all Christendom upside down.”  Pecquius, not considering honour a trifle or a formality, said that “for nothing in the world would his Highness the Archduke descend to a cowardly action or to anything that would sully his honour.”  Villeroy said that the Prince had compelled his wife, pistol in hand, to follow him to the Netherlands, and that she was no longer bound to obey a husband who forsook country and king.  Her father demanded her, and she said “she would rather be strangled than ever to return to the company of her husband.”  The Archdukes were not justified in keeping her against her will in perpetual banishment.  He implored the Ambassador in most pathetic terms to devise some means of sending back the Princess, saying that he who should find such expedient would do the greatest good that was ever done to Christianity, and that otherwise there was no guarantee against a universal war.  The first design of the King had been merely to send a moderate succour to the Princes of Brandenburg and Neuburg, which could have given no umbrage to the Archdukes, but now the bitterness growing out of the affairs of the Prince and Princess had caused him to set on foot a powerful army to do worse.  He again implored Pecquius to invent some means of sending back the Princess, and the Ambassador besought him ardently to divert the King from his designs.  Of this the Secretary of State left little hope and they parted, both very low and. dismal in mind.  Subsequent conversations with the leading councillors of state convinced Pecquius that these violent menaces were only used to shake the constancy of the Archduke, but that they almost all highly disapproved the policy of the King.  “If this war goes on, we are all ruined,” said the Duke d’Epernon to the Nuncius.