Meanwhile, Marguerite de Valois is awakened by some one beating violently with feet and hands against her door crying out, “Navarre! Navarre!” “My nurse,” writes she, “thinking it was the King, ran and opened the door; but it was M. de Séran, grievously wounded and closely pursued by four archers, who cried out, ‘Kill him; kill him! spare no one.’ De Séran threw himself on my bed to save himself. I, not knowing who he was, jumped out, and he with me, holding by me tightly. We both screamed loudly; I was as frightened as he was, but God sent M. de Nançay, Captain of the Guards, who finding me in this condition, could not help laughing. He drove the archers out and spared the life of this man, whom I put to bed in my closet and kept there till he was well. I changed my night-dress, which was covered with blood. M. de Nançay assured me that my husband was safe and with the King. He threw over me a cloak, and took me to my sister Claude, in whose room I arrived more dead than alive; specially so when, as I set my foot in the antechamber, a gentleman named Bourse dropped, pierced by a ball, dead at my feet. I fell fainting into the arms of M. de Nançay, thinking I was killed also. A little recovered, I went into the small room beyond where my sister slept. While I was there, two gentlemen-in-waiting, who attended my husband, rushed in, imploring me to save their lives. So I went to the King and to the Queen, my brother and my mother, and falling on my knees begged that these gentlemen might be spared, which was granted to me.” “Having,” continues Marguerite, “failed in the principal purpose, _which was not so much against the Huguenots as against the Princes of the blood--the King my husband, and the Prince of Condé_--the Queen, my mother, came to me and ‘_asked me to break my marriage_.’ But I replied that I would not; being sure that she only proposed this in order to murder my husband.”[15]