On retiring from his office, Montaigne returned to his estate. The country was then ravaged by the war of the League. He had great difficulty in saving his family and property in the midst of the contending parties, and once narrowly escaped assassination in his château. To add to the miseries of civil war, the plague broke out in his neighbourhood in 1586; and he then, with his family, left his home and became a wanderer, residing successively at several friends’ houses in other parts of the country. He was at Paris in 1588, busy about a new edition of his Essays. It appears from De Thou, that about this time he was employed in negotiation with a view to mediate peace between Henry of Navarre, afterwards Henry IV., and the Duke of Guise. At Paris, he made the acquaintance of Mademoiselle de Gournay, a young lady, who had conceived a kind of sentimental affection for him by reading his book. In company with her mother, she visited and introduced herself to him, and from that time he called her his “fille d’alliance,” or adopted daughter, a title which she retained for the rest of her life, as she never married. This attachment, which, though warm and reciprocal, has every appearance of being of a purely platonic nature, is one of the remarkable circumstances of Montaigne’s life. At the time of his death, Mademoiselle de Gournay and her mother crossed one-half of France, in spite of the civil troubles and the insecurity of the roads, to mix their tears with those of his widow and daughter. On his return from Paris, in the latter part of 1588, Montaigne stopped at Blois, with De Thou, Pasquier, and other friends. The famous States-General were then assembled in that city, where the murder of the Duke of Guise, and of his brother, the Cardinal, soon after took place (23d and 24th December, 1588). Montaigne had long foreseen that the civil dissensions could only terminate with the death of one of the great party leaders; and he also said to De Thou that Henry of Navarre was inclined to embrace the Catholic faith, were he not afraid of being forsaken by his party; and that, on the other side, Guise himself would not have been averse from adopting the Protestant religion, if he could thereby have promoted his ambitious views. After these events, Montaigne returned to his château. In the following year, he became acquainted with Pierre Charron, a theological writer of considerable reputation. An intimate friendship ensued between the two authors; and Charron, in his book ‘De la Sagesse,’ borrowed many thoughts from the Essays, which he held in high estimation. Montaigne, by his will, empowered Charron to assume the coat of arms of his family, as he himself had no male issue.