Noue, "went incontinently to the admiral for to
make their report, which was to his taste. They told it also to others
of the principals; and some there were who desired that it should be
acted upon; but the majority opined that this notice came from suspected
persons, who had been accustomed to practise fraud and deceit, and that
no account should be made of it." The latter opinion prevailed; and the
battle of Moncontour was fought with extreme acrimony, especially on the
part of the Catholics, who were irritated by the cruelties, as La Noue
himself says, which the Protestants had but lately practised at the fight
of La Roche l'Abeille. Coligny was wounded in the action, after having
killed with his own hand the Marquis Philibert of Baden; and the melley
had been so hot that the admiral's friends found great difficulty in
extricating him and carrying him off the field to get his wound attended
to. Three weeks before the battle, on the 13th of September, Coligny had
been sentenced to death by the Parliament of Paris, and hanged in effigy
on the Place de Greve; and a reward of fifty thousand gold crowns had
been offered to whosoever should give him up to the king's justice dead
or alive, words added, it is said, to the decree at the desire of Charles
IX. himself. Family sorrows were in Coligny's case added to political
reverses; on the 27th of May, in this same year 1569, he had lost his
brother D'Andelot, his faithful comrade in his religious as well as his
warlike career. "He found himself," says D'Aubigne, "saddled with the
blame due to accident, his own merits being passed over in silence; with
the remnant of an army which, when it was whole, was in despair even
before the late disaster; with weak towns, dismayed garrisons, and
foreigners without baggage; himself moneyless, his enemies very powerful,
and pitiless towards all, especially towards him; abandoned by all the
great, except one woman, the Queen of Navarre, who, having nothing but
the title, had advanced to Niort in order to lend a hand to the afflicted
and to affairs in general. This old man, worn down by fever, endured all
these causes of anguish and many others that came to rack him more
painfully than his grievous wound. As he was being borne along in a
litter, Lestrange, an old nobleman, and one of his principal counsellors,
travelling in similar fashion, and wounded likewise, had his own litter,
where the road was broad, moved forward in front of