Du Plessis replied only by a stern, half-scornful silence, and went back to his château at Bonmoy near Saumur; but hardly had he arrived there, than he received a letter from Madame de la Trémoille, informing him that her husband had been seized with gout in the arm, and praying that if there should be no speedy improvement in his condition, du Plessis would come to him. On the following night, she further wrote that if he desired to see his friend alive, he must come quickly. Du Plessis immediately hastened to Thonars, to find Monsieur de la Trémoille exhausted with fever, and gasping with semi-suffocation. He, however, rallied sufficiently to evince great pleasure at the sight of Monsieur du Plessis, “uttering with effort a few words, in which he displayed all his ordinary sense and judgment.” He was further able to recommend to his friend’s care his wife and four children, who were thus losing him while still so young. But the distractions of this life were fast slipping away from the dying man, and it was chiefly upon his soul’s welfare that Du Plessis conversed with him. “It is not for me,” said de la Trémoille, “to speak of anything but that”; and, unheeding all else, he mustered his remaining strength and speech to discuss the life to come—replying always with words that showed his courage in the face of death, the assurance of his faith in Christ, and displaying the sound judgment which had distinguished him in the days of his health. While de la Trémoille was thus struggling in the agonies of death, his daughter Charlotte lay ill with an attack of smallpox; and the distracted Duchess only left her husband’s bedside to tend the suffering child. In the midst of all this trouble a message was brought her that her sister-in-law, the Princess de Condé, desired to speak with her. The Princess, she was told, had met with a mishap in the breaking-down of her coach upon the road near Thonars, and she asked her sister-in-law for the loan of her carriage. Little cordiality existed at this time between the Princess and her brother. Damaging reports of her had recently circulated. She was suspected in the first place of having poisoned her husband. She had, moreover, found difficulty in establishing proofs of the legitimacy of the son born to her after the Prince’s death. In addition to this, she had forsworn the Reformed faith, and given up her son, the little Prince de Condé, into the hands of the King to be reared in the Catholic creed.