Before going to execution, the condemned man withdrew all the accusations he had made against Madame de Chevreuse, declaring that “what he had written, he had written in the extremity of rage and by reason of an erroneous belief which he entertained that she had deceived him,” and, after signing the recantation, he sent for his confessor and charged him to inform the King that everything he had said against the Queen and Madame de Chevreuse was false. In the hope that the intercession of _Monsieur_, who had been shamed into making some belated efforts to induce the King to spare Chalais’s life, and that the gain of a few days might mean his salvation, the friends of the condemned had bribed the executioner of Nantes to leave the town. Their intervention merely served to make the unhappy man’s end the more cruel, for, instead of postponing the execution until the headsman of Nantes could be fetched, Richelieu sent for a criminal then lying under sentence of death in the prison of Nantes, who, on the promise that he should be accorded his life, undertook to replace him. The improvised executioner bungled the business in the most shocking manner, and, according to one contemporary account, more than thirty blows were required before the head at last fell. Chalais’s body was given to his mother, who caused it to be buried beneath the high altar in the Church of the Franciscans at Nantes.[44] Such was the end of Chalais and of the conspiracy which is sometimes known by his name, though it might with far more justice be called by that of Madame de Chevreuse, since it was she who had pulled the strings by which her luckless puppet of a lover danced to the scaffold. If it had succeeded, it would have changed the face of the realm, but its complete failure, which placed all its leaders, with the exception of the Comte de Soissons who had prudently taken to flight, in the power of Richelieu, immensely strengthened the government it was intended to overthrow. On September 2 the Maréchal d’Ornano anticipated the executioner by dying in prison,[45] and, two and a half years later, the Grand Prior followed him to the grave. The Duc de Vendôme remained in captivity until 1630, when he was set at liberty, though his government of Brittany, which had made him so great a power for mischief, was never restored to him. As for _Monsieur_, he was discharged in order that he might marry Mlle. de Montpensier. The marriage contract was signed on August 5, and the wedding celebrated the following day by the triumphant Richelieu.