how their faces[760]--had pushed
an army from the mouth of the Gironde to the mouth of the Rhone. If
Viscount Monclar had fallen mortally wounded near Castres, and brave La
Loue had been surprised and killed near Montpellier, the Protestants had,
nevertheless, sustained little injury. They had been largely reinforced on
the way, both by the local troops that joined them and by chivalric
spirits such as M. de Piles, who followed them so soon as he was forced to
surrender Saint Jean d'Angely; or, like Beaudine and Renty, who had been
left with La Rochefoucauld to guard La Rochelle, but who, impatient of
long inaction, at length obtained permission to attach themselves to the
princes, and caught up with them at Castres, after a journey full of
hazardous adventures. The Huguenot army, says La Noue, had been but an
insignificant snow-ball when it started on its adventurous course; but the
imprudence of its opponents permitted it to roll on, without hinderance,
until it grew to a portentous size.[761] The jealousy existing between
Montluc and Marshal Damville, who commanded for the king--the former as
lieutenant-general in Gascony, and the latter as governor in
Languedoc--undoubtedly removed many difficulties from the way of Admiral
Coligny; and Montluc openly accused his rival, who was a Montmorency, of
purposely furthering the designs of his heretical cousin. The accusation
was a baseless fabrication; yet it obtained, as such stories generally do,
a wide currency among the prejudiced and the ignorant, who could explain
Damville's failure to impede Coligny's progress in no more satisfactory
way than as the result of collusion between the son and the nephew of the
late constable.[762]

[Sidenote: The admiral turns toward Paris.]

[Sidenote: His illness interrupts negotiations.]

Coligny had not yet accomplished his main object. Turning northward, and
hugging the right bank of the Rhone, he prosecuted his undertaking of
carrying the war to the very gates of Paris. The few small pieces of
artillery the Protestants possessed, it was now found difficult to drag
over rugged hills that descended to the river's edge. They were,
therefore, at first transported to the other side, and finally left behind
in some castles garrisoned by the Huguenots. The recruits that had been
expected from Dauphiny came in very small numbers, and it was with
diminished forces that Coligny and the princes, on the twenty-sixth of
May, reached Saint Etie