Moulins in the Bourbonnais is one of the neatest and prettiest towns in France. Of the magnificent castle where Charles and Catherine de Medicis sat in council very little remains save a fragment of a tower, strangely named _Malcoiffée_, which rises high above the brick buildings, and a small pavilion built by the queen-mother. Beside the banks of the smiling Allier, and in those irregular streets where many a house of variegated brick, red and white, still dates back beyond this period, were crowded the princes of the blood, several cardinals and bishops, the chief nobility, and the principal officers of the parliaments of France. The resolutions they adopted were merely administrative, reforming many judicial abuses, but they remained a landmark in French jurisprudence until all law was swept away in the great Revolution. But law reform was merely a secondary object with Catherine. With every motive for desiring a continuance of peace, she saw that this was impossible unless the hostile leaders would agree to lay aside their private feuds and become friends. Between the Guises and Coligny there could be no amity, so long as they held him to be the instigator of the late duke’s murder. At the signing of the treaty of Amboise, the Prince of Condé had come forward as a compurgator--to adopt a well-known Anglo-Saxon term--and taken oath that Coligny was innocent. The family were still dissatisfied. One day a funeral procession was seen in the streets of Meulan,[373] where the court then resided. It was Antoinette of Bourbon, mother of the murdered duke, and Anne of Este, his wife, accompanied by her four children, and attended by their friends and partisans, who in long mourning robes and with veiled faces were going to the king to sue for justice. In gloomy silence, broken only by their sobs, the two ladies entered the palace and fell at the king’s feet, demanding justice. Charles raised them graciously and promised what they asked. Their case was laid before the Parliament of Paris, from which it was transferred to the privy-council, with the injunction that no farther steps should be taken within three years. Various attempts at reconciliation were made during the interval, and as this blood-feud had indisputably very much to do with the massacre of St. Bartholomew, it may not be a waste of time to show the progress of the quarrel. In December, 1563, Morvilliers, Bishop of Orleans, wrote to the Bishop of Rennes, embassador to the emperor: “One would willingly find a way of arrangement between them; but the means are very difficult considering the offense and the particulars of the feud. It is impossible but at last this should burst (_crève_) under some dagger (_coustel_), and that the one party for revenge or the other for security, should attempt something.” Eleven days later the same writer continues: “We are in great trouble through the difference between the family of the late Duke of Guise and the admiral, and many people would