ion of the Parliament of
Toulouse, which held jurisdiction over his own viscounty of Turenne.
Having forwarded this missive to the sovereign, he hastened to Castres,
where he appeared as he had suggested, and caused his presence to be
registered. The determination of Henry to compel his attendance at Paris
was, however, only strengthened by this act of defiance; and having
ascertained that the King was about to despatch a messenger to compel
his obedience, M. de Bouillon left Castres in haste for Orange, whence
he proceeded, by way of Geneva, to Heidelberg, and placed himself under
the protection of the Prince Palatine, after having declared his
innocence to Elizabeth of England and the other Protestant sovereigns,
and entreated their support and mediation.

Thus far, with the exception of Biron himself, all the members of this
famous conspiracy had escaped with their lives, and some among them
without loss, either of freedom or of property; one of their number,
however, was fated to be less fortunate, and this one was the Baron de
Fontenelles,[203] a man of high family, who had for several years
rendered himself peculiarly obnoxious to the King and his ministers, and
whose atrocious barbarities caused him to fall unpitied. This wretched
man, after having been put to the torture, was, by the sentence
pronounced against him by the council, broken alive upon the wheel,
where he suffered the greatest agony during an hour and a half. His
lieutenant was condemned to the gallows for having been the medium of
his communication with the Spanish Government; although, even as he was
ascending the fatal ladder, he continued to declare that he had always
been ignorant of the contents of the packets which he was charged to
deliver, and could neither read nor write.[204]

With the life of Biron, the conspiracy had terminated; while his fate
had not failed to produce universal consternation. His devotion to the
early fortunes of the King had been at once so great and so efficient,
his military renown was so universally acknowledged, and his favour with
the monarch was so apparently beyond the reach of chance or change, that
his unhappy end pointed a moral even to the proudest, and so paralysed
the spirit of those who might otherwise have felt inclined to question
the royal authority, that even the nearest and dearest of his friends
uttered no murmur; while those individuals who had dreaded to find
themselves compromised by his ruin,