efensive weapons, he became somewhat less violent; and he no sooner
ascertained that Henry had refused to comply with the petition of his
family than he said, with a bitter laugh: "Ha! I see that they wish me
to take the road to the scaffold." Thenceforward he ceased to demand
justice on his accusers, became less imperious, and even admitted that
he had no rational hope save in the mercy of the monarch.[194]

On the 27th of July, the preliminary arrangements having been completed,
the Marechal was conducted to the Palais de Justice by the Sieur de
Montigny,[195] the Governor of Paris, in a covered barge escorted by
twelve or fifteen armed men. Previously, however, to his being put upon
his trial, he was privately interrogated by the commissioners chosen for
that purpose; but this last judicial effort to save him only tended to
secure his ruin. When confronted with his judges, Biron appeared to have
lost all consistency of character; the soldier was sunk in the sophist;
he argued vaguely and inconsistently; and compromised his own cause by
the very clumsiness of the efforts which he made to clear himself.
Unaware of the revelations of La Fin, when he was confronted with him he
declared him to be a man of honour, his relative, and his very good
friend; but the depositions of the Burgundian noble were no sooner made
known to him than he retracted his former assertion, branding him as a
sorcerer, a traitor, an assassin, and the vilest of men, with other
epithets too coarse for repetition.[196] These terrible accusations,
however, came too late to serve his cause; he had already committed
himself by his previous panegyric; and, perceiving that such was the
case, he hastened to support his testimony against his former accomplice
by asserting that were Renaze alive and in France, he should be able to
prove the truth of what he advanced, and to justify himself.
Unfortunately for the success of this assurance, Renaze in his turn made
his appearance in court; having, by a strange chance, recently escaped
from Savoy, where the Duke had held him a prisoner; and Biron had the
mortification of finding that this, another of his ancient allies, had
not been more faithful to him in his adversity than La Fin. These two
witnesses, indeed, decided his fate; as the letters which were produced
against him were proved to have been written before the previous pardon
granted to him by Henry at Lyons, and they were consequently of no avail
as reg