Although not unaccustomed to the declamations and invectives of the priests, this harangue, prompted by a savage fanaticism, astonished the States-General. The admiral demanded satisfaction from the queen-mother for the insult to himself, and Jean Quintin was compelled to offer him an apology. “A few days after,” says Jean de Serres, “he died of mortification, on finding himself exposed by several published replies to his harangue, in which his calumnies and falsehoods were clearly refuted.”[36] XIV. The States-General had served the cause of the Reformation. The Cardinal de Lorraine, annoyed at having played only a secondary part, withdrew to his archbishopric at Rheims. The Duke de Guise retired from the court; and the queen-mother, seeing that the two orders of the laity disapproved of religious persecutions, manifested, in concert with the Chancellor L’Hospital, a favourable disposition towards the Calvinists. Coligny caused the reformed faith to be preached in his apartments, and Catherine de Medicis opened the pulpit of the palace of Fontainebleau to the bishop Montluc, the same who had so forcibly exclaimed against the abuses of the Roman church in the assembly of Notables. The courtiers, ever ready to range themselves on the side of fortune and power, flocked around the new preachers, and left a Jacobin monk to preach the Lent sermon to himself. “It seems to me,” said the Jesuit Maimbourg bitterly of the queen-mother, “that, on the most favourable construction, it may be fearlessly said, that if all she did upon this occasion was but a pretence, she did ill to feign so well as to give ground to believe that she belonged to the new sect. For she not only allowed the ministers to preach in the apartments of the prince, where all the world crowded to hear him, whilst a poor Jacobin, who preached the Lent sermon at Fontainebleau, was deserted; but she went so far as to take part herself with all her ladies at the sermons of the bishop of Valence, who preached openly, in one of the rooms of the château, the new dogmas he had drawn from the heresies of Luther and Calvin. So sudden and so strange a change took place at court, that one would have said she was quite a Calvinist. Although it was Lent, meat was publicly sold, and spread upon every table. They talked no more of attending Mass, and the young king, who was still taken there to keep up appearances, went almost alone. They scoffed at the authority of the Popes, at the worship of the saints and of images, at indulgences, and at the ceremonies of the Church, which they treated as superstitions.”[37]