d been killed in sorties or had died of want. The cardinal at the same
time entered this city, which he had subdued by sheer perseverance;
Guiton came to meet him with six archers; he had not appeared during the
negotiations, saying that his duty detained him in the town. "Away with
you!" said the cardinal, "and at once dismiss your archers, taking care
not to style yourself mayor any more on pain of death." Guiton made no
reply, and went his way quietly to his house, a magnificent dwelling till
lately, but now lying desolate amidst the general ruin. He was not
destined to reside there long; the heroic defender of La Rochelle was
obliged to leave the town and retire to Tournay-Boutonne. He returned to
La Rochelle to die, in 1656.

The king made his entry into the subjugated town on the 1st of November,
1628: it was full of corpses in the chambers, the houses, the public
thoroughfares; for those who still survived were so weak that they had
not been able to bury the dead. Madame de Rohan and her daughter, who
had not been included in the treaty, were not admitted to the honor of
seeing his Majesty. "For having been the brand that had consumed this
people," they were sent to prison at Niort; "there kept captive, without
exercise of their religion, and so strictly that they had but one
domestic to wait upon them, all which, however, did not take from them
their courage or wonted zeal for the good of their party. The mother
sent word to the Duke of Rohan, her son, that he was to put no faith in
her letters, since she might be made to write them by force, and that no
consideration of her pitiable condition should make her flinch to the
prejudice of her party, whatever harm she might be made to suffer."
[_Memoires du Duc de Rohan,_ t. i. p. 395.] Worn out by so much
suffering, the old Duchess of Rohan died in 1631 at her castle Du Pare:
she had been released from captivity by the pacification of the South.

With La Rochelle fell the last bulwark of religious liberties.
Single-handed, Duke Henry of Rohan now resisted at the head of a handful
of resolute men. But he was about to be crushed in his turn. The
capture of La Rochelle had raised the cardinal's power to its height; it
had, simultaneously, been the death-blow to the Huguenot party and to
the factions of the grandees. "One of them was bold enough to say," on
seeing that La Rochelle was lost, "Now we may well say that we are all
lost." [_Memoires de Richeli