Henri de Navarre and the young Duc d'Alençon were retained as prisoners in the Louvre, where they amused themselves by flying quails in their rooms and making love to the ladies. The young prince escaped first, on the evening of the 15th of September, 1575, but the king did not succeed in evading the vigilance of his keepers till the following February, when he took advantage of a hunt in the forest of Senlis, to ride to rejoin _Monsieur_, his young brother-in-law, and the Prince de Condé, thus abjuring the vows of the Church, which he had taken under compulsion. The _Paix de Monsieur_ which followed, signed on the 17th of April, 1576, granted the followers of Luther and Calvin the free exercise of their religion everywhere, "as much as they would have acquired by gaining two battles against the court of France." To the zealous Catholics this peace seemed like a betrayal of their cause, and the _Sainte Ligue_, for the maintenance of the privileges of the Church and the king, was organized throughout the country under the auspices of Henri de Guise, who placed himself at the head of the movement. Henri III, who had fled from his throne of Poland to take that of France as soon as he heard of the death of his brother, had not even the few good qualities of the latter. Depraved, prodigal, effeminate, capable only of the most puerile occupations, he excited the indignation of the Parisians by his dissolute manners, by his travesty of feminine apparel, his fine collars, his necklaces of pearls, his pourpoint opened to show his throat. D'Aubigné declared that he could not decide whether he saw "a woman-king or a man-queen." In his solemn entry into his capital he scandalized the grave citizens by his appearance, "having around him a great quantity of parakeets, monkeys, and little dogs." His courtiers and favorites naturally followed his example, and shared the popular disfavor; in 1576, the Parisians began to designate them as _mignons du roi_. Their worthy master, whenever it arrived to one of them to be killed in duel or ambuscade, contented himself with giving him a fine tomb and a marble statue in the church of Saint-Paul, hence called "the seraglio of the mignons," so that, says De Thou, "the usual threat against one of these favorites was: 'I will have him carved in marble like the others.'" [Illustration: STAIRCASE IN THE RESIDENCE OF THE VICOMTESSE ALIX DE JANZÉ, RUE MARIGNAN. ABOUT TO BE PRESENTED, WITH ITS COLLECTION, TO THE CITY.]