best of it when it came to those _diables d'escritures_--that Pope Pius V. wrote to the Cardinal de Lorraine to express his violent disapproval. As had more than once already been the case, the return of peace was quickly followed by the marked diminution of the influence of the house of Guise. The Duke of Anjou cherished an instinctive hatred and jealousy of Henry of Lorraine; whilst the Cardinal had incurred the displeasure of the Queen-mother, who, as well as Charles IX., had previously been greatly angered by the presumption of the Duke of Guise in aspiring to the hand of her daughter Margaret. At one time, so furiously chafed was the King's naturally violent temper by the pretensions of the Guise party--against whom his brother Anjou lost no opportunity of irritating him--that he actually resolved on the immediate death of the young Duke of Guise, who only escaped through the timidity and indecision of Henry of Angoulême, the King's bastard brother--commissioned to make an end of him at a hunting party--and through warnings given him, it is said, by Margaret herself. The Montmorencys, cousins of the Colignys, seemed to have succeeded to the influence the Guises had lost: the Marshal and his brother d'Anville governed the Queen-mother; and so fierce was the animosity between the rival families, that Guise and Méru, brother of Marshal Montmorency, openly quarrelled in the King's Chamber, and, on leaving the palace, exchanged a challenge, whose consequences persons sent expressly by Charles IX. had great difficulty in averting. In short, during the year 1571, "no more was heard of the Cardinal of Lorraine than if he had been dead; nor was anything known about the Guises, except that they had celebrated at Joinville the birth of a son to the Duke," who had married, in the previous year, Catherine of Cleves, widow of the Prince de Portien.