Mlle. de Châteauneuf was so proud of the distinction which his Royal Highness had conferred upon her that she was prepared to make any sacrifice rather than lose him. Anjou already showed a marked taste for the ornaments and dress proper to the other sex--a caprice which he carried to the most extravagant lengths when he became King of France[98]--and wore habitually “a double row of rings on his fingers and pendants in his ears.” In the hope of retaining his wayward affections, the poor lady ruined herself in jewellery, and covered her royal lover with gold chains and costly trinkets of every description. He accepted them all with alacrity; nevertheless, the star of _la belle_ Châteauneuf paled before that of the Princesse de Condé and she suffered the fate which had befallen Isabelle de Limeuil. She was not called upon to restore the presents which Anjou had made her--she had given far more than she had ever received--but, on the other hand, she had the mortification of seeing those which she had made the prince decorating the person of her triumphant rival. “In order to show,” writes Brantôme, “that he had abandoned his former mistress for her [the Princesse de Condé], and that he desired to honour and serve her entirely, without bestowing a thought on the other, he gave her all the favours, jewels, rings, portraits, bracelets, and pretty conceits of every kind which his former mistress had given him, which being perceived by her, she was like to die with mortification, and was unable to keep silence about it, but was contented to compromise the reputation of the other by compromising her own.” The amours of Anjou and Marie de Clèves were interrupted by the outbreak of the fourth civil war. For a moment, Catherine had deluded herself into the belief that the Huguenot party was expiring at her feet, but she soon learned that religions do not die beneath the knives of assassins. Coligny, La Rochefoucauld, Soubise, Pilles, and other aristocratic leaders had perished in the St. Bartholomew; Navarre and Condé had been constrained to renounce their faith; Montgommery and La Noue were in exile; the Protestant noblesse was disheartened and disorganized by the loss of its chiefs. But the popular element in the Reform party saved it, and raised the banner which was falling from the hands of the nobility. The citizens of La Rochelle, Montauban and Sancerre continued the struggle which the Bourbons and Châtillons had begun, demanding not only religious toleration, but the redress of political grievances; and other towns in the South and West followed their example.