never have been able to do good or harm.” The deputies of Languedoc escaped this ambuscade, and arrived safe and sound at Orleans; but they “were kept under strict watch, and their papers were confiscated up to the moment when the death of the king occurred to deliver them from all fear.” [_Histoire des Etats generaux,_ by G. Picot, t. ii. pp. 25-29.] In Provence, in Dauphiny, in the countship of Avignon, at Lyons, on occasion and in the midst of the electoral struggle, several local risings, seizures of arms, and surprisals of towns took place and disturbed the public peace. There was not yet religious civil war, but there were the preparatory note and symptoms of it. At the same time that they were thus laboring to keep out of the approaching states-general adversaries of obscure rank and belonging to the people, the Guises had very much at heart a desire that the great leaders of the Reformers and of the Catholic malcontents, especially the two princes of the house of Bourbon, the King of Navarre and the Prince of Conde, should come to this assembly, and there find themselves under the thumb of their enemies. They had not gone to the assemblage of notables at Fontainebleau, and their hostility to the Guises had been openly shown during and since that absence. Nothing was left untried to attract them, not to Meaux any longer, but to Orleans, whither the meeting of the states-general had been transferred. King Francis II., a docile instrument in the hands of his uncles and his young queen their niece, wrote letter after letter to the King of Navarre, urging him to bring with him his brother the Prince of Conde to clear himself of the accusations brought against him “by these miserable heretics, who made marvellous charges against him. . . . Conde would easily prove the falsity of the assertions made by these rascals.” The King of Navarre still hesitated; the king insisted haughtily. “I should be sorry,” he wrote on the 30th of August, 1560, “that into the heart of a person of such good family, and one that touches me so nearly, so miserable an inclination should have entered; being able to assure you that whereinsoever he refuses to obey me I shall know perfectly well how to make it felt that I am king.” The Prince of Conde’s mother-in-law, the Countess of Roye, wrote to the queen-mother that the prince would appear at court if the king commanded it; but she begged her beforehand not to think it strange if, on going to a place where his most cruel enemies had every power, he went attended by his friends. Whether she really were, or only pretended to be, shocked at what looked like a threat, Catherine replied that no person in France had a right to approach the king in any other wise than with his ordinary following, and that, if the Prince of Conde went to court with a numerous escort, he would find the king still better attended. At last the King of Navarre and his brother made up their minds.