Condé and his bride-elect were both at Blois when the Queen of Navarre arrived there. It was some years since Jeanne had passed any time at the Court, and it had changed very much for the worse in the interval. In a letter to her son, she stigmatizes it, with good reason, as “the most vicious and corrupt society that ever existed.” “No one that I see here,” she writes, “is exempt from its evil influences. Your cousin, the marchioness,[93] is so greatly changed that she gives no sign of belonging to the Religion, if it be not that she abstains from attending Mass; for, in all else, save that she abstains from this idolatry, she conducts herself like other Papists, and my sister _Madame la Princesse_[94] sets an even worse example. This I write to you in confidence. The bearer of this letter will tell you how the King emancipates himself; it is a pity. I would not for any consideration that you should abide here. For this reason, I desire to see you married, that you and your wife may withdraw yourselves from this corruption; for, although I believed it to be very great, it surpasses my anticipation. Here, it is not the men who solicit the women, but the women the men. If you were here, you would never escape, save by some remarkable mercy of God.” Although Jeanne strenuously resisted all attempts of the King and Catherine to draw her son to Blois, she felt perfectly at ease in regard to Condé’s presence there, for the young prince’s Calvinism was of that rigid type which made no distinction between pleasure and vice, and, unlike his cousin, he had never shown any inclination for feminine society. He had, nevertheless, quickly succumbed to the charms of his beautiful _fiancée_, though his awkward attempts at love-making must have aroused no small amount of amusement; for the Queen of Navarre wrote to her son that “if he could not make love with better grace than his cousin, she counselled him to leave the matter alone.”