that great result. On the 4th of March,
1589, soon after the states of Blois had been dismissed, he set before
France, in an eloquent manifesto, the expression of his anxieties and his
counsels: "I will speak freely," said he, "to myself first and then to
others, that we may be all of us without excuse. Let us not be puffed up
with pride on one side or another. As for me, although I have received
more favors from God in this than in all past wars, and, whilst the two
other parties (how sad that they must be so called!) are enfeebled, mine,
to all appearance, has been strengthened, nevertheless I well know that,
whenever I go beyond my duty, God will no longer bless me; and I shall do
so whenever, without reason and in sheer lightness of heart, I attack my
king and trouble the repose of his kingdom. . . . I declare, then,
first of all to those who belong to the party of the king my lord, that
if they do not counsel him to make use of me, and of the means which God
hath given me, for to make war, not on them of Lorraine, not on Paris,
Orleans, or Toulouse, but on those who shall hinder the peace and the
obedience owed to this crown, they alone will be answerable for the woes
which will come upon the king and the kingdom. . . . And as to those
who still adhere to the name and party of the League, I, as a Frenchman,
conjure them to put up with their losses as I do with mine, and to
sacrifice their quarrels, vengeance, and ambition to the welfare of
France, their mother, to the service of their king, to their own repose
and ours. If they do otherwise, I hope that God will not abandon the
king, and will put it into his heart to call around him his servants,
myself the first, who wish for no other title, and who shall have
sufficient might and good right to help him wipe out their memory from
the world and their party from France. . . . I wish these written
words to go proclaiming for me throughout the world that I am ready to
ask my lord the king for peace, for the repose of his kingdom and for my
own. . . . And finally, if I find one or another so sleepy-headed or
so ill-disposed that none is moved thereby, I will call God to my aid,
and, true servant of my king, worthy of the honor that belongs to me as
premier prince of this realm, though all the world should have conspired
for its ruin, I protest, before God and before man, that, at the risk of
ten thousand lives, I will essay--all alone--to prevent it."