From his closet Henry proceeded to the last place on earth which might, under the circumstances, have been anticipated. He went straight to the chamber of the Queen, where her Majesty was still unable to leave her bed, and there he gave full scope to the anguish under which he was labouring. "Never," says Bassompierre, "did I see a man so lost or so overcome." In the room were also assembled the Marquis de Coeuvres,[409] the Comte de Cramail, and MM. d'Elbène and de Loménie, with whom he unscrupulously discussed, in the presence of his outraged wife, the readiest means of compelling the immediate return of the fugitives. As may naturally be anticipated, the advice likely to prove the most flattering to his wishes was offered on all sides, and a thousand expedients were suggested and discussed only to be found unfeasible, until the King, in despair, notwithstanding the lateness of the hour, resolved upon summoning his ministers. Accordingly MM. de Sillery, de Villeroy, de Jeannin, and de Sully soon joined the party, which had, moreover, been augmented by the presence of several of the most confidential friends of the monarch, among others by De Gêvres,[410] De la Force,[411] and La Varenne; and once more the King sought a solution of the difficulty. Here, however, the judgment and policy of the several councillors differed upon every point. The Chancellor gave it as his opinion that a strong declaration should be made against the step taken by the Prince himself, and another equally stringent against those by whom he should be aided and abetted in his evasion; M. de Villeroy advised that despatches should forthwith be forwarded to the several ambassadors of the French King at foreign Courts to warn the sovereigns of those states against receiving the fugitive Prince within their territories, and to exhort them to take measures for enforcing his return to France; M. de Jeannin declared that the most expeditious method of compelling obedience, and forestalling the inconvenience and scandal of the self-expatriation of the first Prince of the Blood, would be to cause him to be immediately followed by a captain of the bodyguard, instructed to expostulate with him on his disloyalty and imprudence, and to threaten instant war against any state by whom he should be harboured; while when Sully at length spoke it was only to deprecate each and all of these measures, by which he insisted that the monarch would give an importance to the departure of the Prince that his enemies would but too gladly turn to their own account; whereas, if he made no comment upon the flight of M. de Condé, and treated it as a matter without importance, he would at once render him insignificant in the eyes of those sovereigns who would fain look upon him as a martyr, and use him as a means to harass and annoy his own monarch.