The day after the battle, Condé was again entrusted to the care of Damville, who had only surrendered his prisoner to Guise as an act of deference, and who was subsequently constituted his legal custodian by a special authority from the King. Damville, who naturally regarded him as a hostage for the safety of his father, the Constable, guarded him very strictly, though his servants were allowed to remain with him, and a Huguenot pastor named Pérussel, who had also been taken prisoner, was authorized to minister to his spiritual needs and conducted a long “_prêche_” in his chamber every day. After being successively conducted to Chartres, Blois, and Amboise in the wake of the Court, he was incarcerated by the Regent’s orders, in the Château of Onzain, an old feudal fortress, about three leagues from the last-named town.[18] Here he succeeded in bribing two of his gaolers, and arranged with their assistance to escape in the disguise of a peasant. But one of the men betrayed the plot to Damville, and Condé learned that all had been discovered by seeing the other soldier dangling from a gibbet erected beneath his window. After this, the prince was deprived of his servants, placed in solitary confinement, and most rigorously guarded; and a rumour began to spread, though it was probably without foundation, that the Guises intended to compel Catherine to have him again brought to trial for high treason. Meanwhile, the Duc de Guise had laid siege to Orléans, the last stronghold left to the Reformers. The town taken, it was his intention to call out the _ban_ and _arrière-ban_, for which purpose a tax had been levied on the revenues of the Church, overwhelm Coligny, who with the Huguenot cavalry was overrunning Normandy, drive the English from Le Havre and Dieppe, and convert his office of Lieutenant-General of the Kingdom, which the King had been obliged to confer upon him in recognition of his services at Dreux, into a dictatorship. The defenders of Orléans, decimated by famine and the plague, were incapable of offering more than a feeble resistance; the outworks were quickly captured, and the final assault was daily expected, when, on the evening of February 15, 1563, while returning from a reconnaissance, the duke was mortally wounded by a Huguenot fanatic, Poltrot de Méré, who fired upon him from the shelter of a copse. He expired six days later, to the undisguised joy of the Reformers and to the secret relief of Catherine, who dreaded nothing so much as the prospect of a second period of Guise ascendancy.