The crisis now rapidly approached. The Huguenot chiefs were widely separated from each other--Montgomery in Normandy, Genlis and Mouy in Picardy, Rochefoucauld at Angouleme, D'Andelot in Brittany, Conde and Coligny in Burgundy. The royal court, now entirely in the interest of the Guises, resolved to execute the plan which the Roman Catholic nobles of this faction had sketched to Alva three years before at Bayonne, by the seizure of five or six of the leaders, as a measure preliminary to the total suppression of Protestantism in France. Gaspard de Tavannes was entrusted with the execution of the most important part of the scheme--the arrest of the prince and the admiral. Fourteen companies of gens-d'armes and as many ensigns of infantry stood under his orders, and Noyers was closely beset on all sides.[576] It was at this moment, when secrecy was all important to the success of the plot, that the tidings of the threatening storm reached its destined victims. It has long been believed and reported that Tavannes, unwilling to lend himself to unworthy machinations whose execution would have wounded his soldierly pride, took measures to warn Conde and Coligny of their danger. Unfortunately, the story rests on no better authority than his "Memoires," written by a son who has often shown a greater desire to vindicate his father's memory than to maintain historical truth, and who, writing under the rule of the Bourbons, had in this case, as in that of the pretended deliverance of Henry of Navarre and Henry of Conde, at the great Parisian massacre four years later, sufficient inducements for endeavoring to represent the reigning family as indebted to his father for its preservation.[577] Brantome is consistent with the entire mass of contemporary documents in representing Tavannes as the author of the whole scheme; and certainly one who was so deeply implicated in the massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day cannot have been too humane to think of capturing, or even assassinating, two nobles, although one of them was a prince of the blood. A more probable story is that Tavannes was the unintentional instrument of the disclosure, a letter of his having fallen into Huguenot hands, containing the words: "The deer is in the net; the game is ready."[578] But, in point of fact, the Huguenots needed no such hints. With their perfect organization, in the face of so treacherous a foe, after so many violations as they had of late witnessed of the royal edict, they were already on their guard, and the hostile preparations had not escaped their notice. [Sidenote: Conde's last appeal to the king.]