After having held the first presidentship for thirty-four years, Harlay, whose sight and hearing were impaired, resigned it early in 1616, and he died, on the 23d of October, of the same year, at the age of eighty. Born at Paris, in 1541, of a family which had given several eminent magistrates to the state, Potier de Blancmesnil attained the rank of president à mortier in 1578. With talents less splendid than those of Harlay, he was not inferior to him in probity and devoted loyalty. From the imprisonment which followed his seizure by Bussi le Clerc he was released in a few days; but he did not long retain his liberty. When Henry, on the 1st of November, 1589, made himself master of the suburbs of Paris, and there seemed reason to believe that the new monarch would soon enter the city in triumph, the joy of Potier was so undisguised, that the Leaguers again sent him to his old quarters in the Bastile. He was brought to trial, as an adherent of the Bearnese—for so Henry was contemptuously called—and he would no doubt have suffered an ignominious death, had not the duke of Mayenne interposed, and released him from prison. Throwing himself at the feet of his deliverer, Potier exclaimed, “My Lord, I am indebted to you for my life; yet I dare to request from you a still greater benefit, that of permitting me to join my legitimate sovereign. I shall all my life acknowledge you as my benefactor; but I cannot serve you as my master!” Mayenne had greatness of mind enough not to be offended by this speech. Affected even to tears by the appeal, he raised up and embraced the suppliant, and allowed him to depart. It is delightful to find a few bright flowers of virtue among the lurid and noxious growth produced by civil war. Henry the Fourth rewarded Potier by making him president of the parliament of Chalons. In that office he continued during the whole of Henry’s reign. When the monarch perished by the knife of Ravaillac, the news was carried to Chalons, accompanied, as is customary in such cases, by a thousand terrific rumours. As soon as he heard the lamentable tidings, René Potier, the president’s son, who was bishop of Beauvais, hurried to the hall where the parliament was sitting, and entreated him to quit the place without delay, in a carriage which he had brought for the purpose. But the magistrate had more firmness than the prelate. He answered, in a loud voice, that the state and the country called on him not to absent himself on such an emergency, but to die, if needful, in order to secure the obedience which was due to Henry the fourth’s son; and he earnestly exhorted his colleagues not to remove from their seats. It was probably for this opportune act of courage and fidelity that Mary de Medicis conferred on him the title of her chancellor. Potier lived to the venerable age of ninety-four, preserving all his faculties to the last. His decease took place on the 1st of June 1635.