Less importance, however, was attached to these happy prognostications than to a circumstance which appeared to remove the suspicion on which the charge against the princess had been principally based, namely, that she was with child by the page Belcastel, and had poisoned her husband to escape his just vengeance. This was the striking resemblance which the infant prince bore to the late Prince de Condé, which was admitted even by some who had until then been inclined to believe in the guilt of the princess. “To-day, at noon precisely,” wrote the governor of Saint-Jean-d’Angely to the Duc de Thouars, “_Madame la Princesse_, your sister, has been delivered of the most beautiful prince imaginable, and with more resemblance (so far as one can judge at his age) to the late Monseigneur, his father, than one can describe. For which I praise God, as do an infinite number of honourable people, your servants.” And Gilbert, the mayor of the town, wrote that “he had seen to-day the dead father born again in a child so like him in every respect that there was not a man living but was of opinion that never had son so closely resembled his father.” Desmoustiers, the pastor of the Protestant Church of Saint-Jean-d’Angely, and Delacroix, the late prince’s chaplain, bore similar testimony, the former declaring that the boy resembled his father “_en tout et partout_”; while the latter concluded his letter by observing: “Thus does Our Lord (just Judge) cause the truth concerning the poisoning to be known.”[133] Whether it was that the birth of a son had given the Princesse de Condé a certain prestige with the Protestants, disposed to see in this child a hope for the future, or that the want of proofs rendered the prosecution difficult to continue, or that the King of Navarre’s attention was occupied by weightier matters, the investigation was not resumed, and the members of the commission which had been appointed to conduct it dispersed. The princess, nevertheless, remained in captivity, although she now enjoyed a certain amount of liberty, since she went twice a week to see her little son, who had been put out to nurse at Mazeroy, near Saint-Jean-d’Angely; and a path across the fields between Beaufief and the road leading to that town, which she generally followed, bears to this day the name of “_le chemin de la princesse_.”[134] She was unable to obtain either the trial before the Parlement of Paris which she had repeatedly demanded or her liberty, and she appealed in vain to her relatives, to the neighbouring nobility, and to every person of importance whom chance happened to bring to Saint-Jean-d’Angely, to use their influence on her behalf. But neither her relatives nor the different nobles to whom she addressed herself seemed disposed to take any active steps in her favour, and it was left to a magistrate, the Président de Thou, to be the first to interest himself in the forsaken woman.