This letter, being intercepted, was sent with great glee by Henry iv., not to the royal hands for which it was destined, but to the Duke of Mayenne.  Great was the wrath of that injured personage as he read such libellous truths.  He forthwith fulminated a scathing reply, addressed to Philip ii., in which he denounced the Duke of Feria as “a dirty ignoramus, an impudent coward, an impostor, and a blind thief;” adding, after many other unsavoury epithets, “but I will do him an honour which he has not merited, proving him a liar with my sword; and I humbly pray your Majesty to grant me this favour and to pardon my just grief, which causes me to depart from the respect due to your Majesty, when I speak of this impostor who has thus wickedly torn my reputation.”

His invectives were, however, much stronger than his arguments in defence of that tattered reputation.  The defiance to mortal combat went for nothing; and, in the course of the next year, the injured Mayenne turned his back on Philip and his Spaniards, and concluded his bargain with the Prince of Bearne.  He obtained good terms:  the government of Burgundy, payment of his debts, and a hundred and twenty thousand crowns in hard cash.  It is not on record that the man of his word, of credit, and of truth, ever restored a penny of the vast sums which he had received from Philip to carry on the business of the League.

Subsequently the duke came one very hot summer’s-day to Monceaux to thank the king, as he expressed it, for “delivering him from Spanish arrogance and Italian wiles;” and having got with much difficulty upon his knees, was allowed to kiss the royal hand.  Henry then insisted upon walking about with him through the park at a prodigious rate, to show him all the improvements, while the duke panted, groaned, and perspired in his vain efforts to keep pace with his new sovereign.

“If I keep this fat fellow walking about in the sun much longer,” whispered the king to De Bethune, who was third in the party, “I shall be sufficiently avenged for all the mischief he has done us.”

At last, when the duke was forced to admit himself to be on the point of expiring with fatigue, he was dismissed to the palace with orders to solace himself with a couple of bottles of excellent wine of Arbois, expressly provided for him by the king’s direction.  And this was all the punishment ever inflicted by the good-humoured monarch on the corpulent conspirator.

The Duke of Guise made his arrangements with the ex-Huguenot on even better terms and at a still earlier day; while Joyeuse and Mercoeur stood out a good while and higgled hard for conditions.  “These people put such a high price on themselves,” said one of Henry’s diplomatists, “that one loses almost more than one gains in buying them.  They strip and plunder us even in our nakedness, and we are obliged, in order to conciliate such harpies, to employ all that we can scrape out of our substance and our blood.  I think, however, that we ought to gain them by whatever means and at whatever price.”