With the object of showing his sympathy with the cardinal in a more practical form, at the end of January, he, in his turn, had the pretension to enter Paris with three hundred horse. On reaching the Bastille, however, he received a message from Montmorency summoning him to retire immediately, which he did, though not without addressing a letter of protest to the King, which was the cause of violent dissensions in the Council, where the Cardinal de Bourbon took the part of his brother, and the Constable energetically defended the action of his son. On a second visit to the capital, which the prince paid a few weeks later, he assured the Bishop of Paris that he would protect the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and that he deplored the affront which had been offered the Cardinal de Lorraine; and when the Parlement complained that, in contravention of the edict, _prêches_ had been held at his house, he answered that he had neither authorized nor attended them. The conduct of the prince, which seemed to foreshadow a complete change of policy on his part, and to confirm the rumours already in circulation as to a matrimonial alliance with the Guises, naturally gave the greatest umbrage to the Huguenots, and the extreme section of the party, already, as we have seen, very dissatisfied with their leader, vented their annoyance in a stream of lampoons and satires. The Duc d’Aumale, in his “Histoire des Princes de Condé,” stigmatizes the Protestants as “unjust and ungrateful,” and declares that “there is no proof that Condé ever contemplated a union by marriage with the House of Lorraine.” “In any case,” continues the royal historian, “if he did ‘bind himself afresh’ to his former rivals; if he refused to take part in all the quarrels and to share all the passions which were raging around him, it was because he was sincerely desirous to obliterate the traces, and prevent the renewal, of the civil war.” The Duc d’Aumale could not, however, have been aware, at the time when this was published, of a letter written by Mary Stuart to her aunt the Duchesse d’Arschot, from which it would appear that the project of a marriage between Condé and the beautiful young widow of François II. had not only been very favourably received by the prince, but that he had actually taken some active steps in the matter. “I hear,” writes Mary, “that the Prince de Condé has demanded my hand of my grandmother[70] and of the Cardinal de Lorraine, my uncle, and that he has made the most splendid offers imaginable, both in regard to religion and other matters.”[71]