with the Rochellois, "because it was not a free town under the king's
absolute dominion as the rest, but under the seigniory of the Counts of
Sancerre." London trans. of 1678, 193.

[1309] Jean de Lery, Discours de l'extreme famine, etc., 25-27.

[1310] Jean de Lery, 38.

[1311] Styled also, in the articles of capitulation, "_le gouverneur par
election_ de ladite ville." He was an able and influential magistrate, who
had been elected to the governorship of his native city at the time of the
former troubles. Lery, 78-80.

[1312] Agrippa d'Aubigne (Hist. univ., ii. 104) distinctly represents La
Chastre as desirous of destroying the entire city; while Lery (p. 77) and
Davila (p. 193) are in doubt whether Johanneau's murder was not effected
by his orders. Yet Lery himself records a conversation he held about this
time with La Chastre (p. 67), in which the latter protested that he was
not, as commonly reported, of a sanguinary disposition, and appealed for
corroboration to his merciful treatment of some Huguenot prisoners that
fell into his hands in the third civil war, whom he refused to surrender
to the Parisian parliament when formally summoned to do so. Claude de la
Chastre's noble letter to Charles IX., of January 21, 1570 (Bulletin, iv.
28), seems to be a sufficient voucher for his veracity. See _ante_,
chapter xvi., p. 345.

[1313] Jean de Lery, 42.

[1314] Agrippa d'Aubigne, i. 104. It would be a great relief could we
believe that inordinate fondness for the dance was the chief vice of the
French court. Unfortunately the moral turpitude of the king and his
favorites rests upon less suspicious grounds than the revolting stories
told on hearsay by the unfriendly writer of the Eusebii Philadelphi
Dialogi (Edinburgi, 1574), ii. 117, 118. The "Affair of Nantouillet,"
occurring just about the time of the Polish ambassadors' arrival in Paris,
is only too authentic. The "Prevot de Paris," M. de Nantouillet (cf.
_ante_, chapter xv., page 258, note), grandson of Cardinal du Prat,
Chancellor of France under Francis I., offended Anjou by somewhat
contemptuously declining the hand of the duke's discarded mistress,
Mademoiselle de Chateauneuf. The lady easily induced her princely lover to
avenge her wounded vanity. One evening Charles IX., the new king of
Poland, the King of Navarre, the Grand Prior of France, and their
attendants, presented themselves at the stately mansion of Nantouillet, on
the southern bank of the Seine