After the "council of conscience," the council of the King was convened for a definitive deliberation in the earlier part of October. Some of the ministers, apparently the two Colberts, Seignelai, and Croissi, insinuated that it would be better not to be precipitate. The Dauphin, a young prince of twenty-four, who resembled, in his undefined character, his grandfather more than his father, and who was destined to remain always as it were lost in the splendid halo of Louis the Great, attempted an intervention that deserves to rescue his name from oblivion. "He represented, from an anonymous memorial that had been addressed to him the evening before, that it was, perhaps, to be apprehended that the Huguenots might take up arms;" "that in case they did not dare to do this, a great number would leave the kingdom, which would injure commerce and agriculture, and thereby even weaken the state." The King replied that he had foreseen all and provided for all, that nothing in the world would be more painful to him than to shed a drop of the blood of his subjects, but that he had armies and good generals whom he would employ, in case of necessity, against rebels who desired their own destruction. As to the argument of interest, he judged it little worthy of consideration, compared with the advantages of an undertaking that would restore to religion its splendor, to the state its tranquillity, and to authority all its rights. The suppression of the Edict of Nantes was resolved upon without further opposition. Father la Chaise and Louvois, according to their ecclesiastical and military correspondence, had promised that it should not even cost the drop of blood of which the King spoke. The aged Chancellor le Tellier, already a prey to the malady that was to bring him to his grave, drew up with trembling hand the fatal declaration, which the King signed October 17th. Louis professed in this preamble to do nothing but continue the pious designs of his grandfather and his father for the reunion of their subjects to the Church. He spoke of the "perpetual and irrevocable" edict of Henry IV as a temporary regulation. "Our cares," he said, "since the truce that we facilitated for this purpose, have had the effect that we proposed to ourselves, since the better and the greater part of our subjects of the so-called Reformed religion have embraced the Catholic; and inasmuch as by reason of this the execution of the Edict of Nantes" "remains useless, we have judged that we could not do better, in order wholly to efface the memory of evils that this false religion had caused in our kingdom, than entirely to revoke the said Edict of Nantes and all that has been done since in favor of the said religion."