y increasing weakness but "Away, away," said
he; "I have taken the manna from heaven, whereby I feel myself so
comforted that it seems to me as if I were already in paradise. This
body has no further need of nourishment;" and so he expired on the 24th
of February, 1563, an object, at his death, of the most profound regret
amongst his army and his party, as well as his family, after having been
during his life the object of their lively admiration. "I do not
forget," says his contemporary Stephen Pasquier in reference to him,
"that it was no small luck for him to die at this period, when he was
beyond reach of the breeze, and when shifting Fortune had not yet played
him any of those turns whereby she is so cunning in lowering the horn of
the bravest."

It is a duty to faithfully depict this pious and guileless death of a
great man, at the close of a vigorous and a glorious life, made up of
good and evil, without the evil's having choked the good. This powerful
and consolatory intermixture of qualities is the characteristic of the
eminent men of the sixteenth century, Catholics or Protestants, soldiers
or civilians; and it is a spectacle wholesome to be offered in times when
doubt and moral enfeeblement are the common malady even of sound minds
and of honest men.

The murderer of Duke Francis of Guise was a petty nobleman of Angoumois,
John Poltrot, Lord of Mere, a fiery Catholic in his youth, who afterwards
became an equally fiery Protestant, and was engaged with his relative La
Renaudie in the conspiracy against the Guises. He had been employed
constantly from that time, as a spy it is said, by the chiefs of the
Reformers--a vocation for which, it would seem, he was but little
adapted, for the indiscretion of his language must have continually
revealed his true sentiments. When he heard, in 1562, of the death of
Anthony de Bourbon, King of Navarre, "That," said he, "is not what will
put an end to the war; what is wanted is the dog with the big collar."
"Whom do you mean?" asked somebody. "The great Guisard; and here's the
arm that will do the trick." "He used to show," says D'Aubigne, "bullets
cast to slay the Guisard, and thereby rendered himself ridiculous."
After the battle of Dreux he was bearer of a message from the Lord of
Soubise to Admiral de Coligny, to whom he gave an account of the
situation of the Reformers in Dauphiny and in Lyonness. His report no
doubt interested the admiral, who gave him twenty