This, then, is the way in which the Queen was the fomenter of all our wars and civil fires, the which she not only did not light but employed all her energies and efforts to extinguish, abhorring to see the death of so many nobles and landed gentlemen.  And without that and her commiseration, those who bore against her a mortal enmity would have found themselves in dire straits, themselves laid beneath the sod, and their party not flourishing as it now is.  All this must be imputed to her goodness of heart, of which we now stand in sore need—­so everybody agrees and the poor people cry:  “We no longer have the Queen Mother to make peace for us!” It was not through lack of her efforts that she did not succeed when she went to Guienne recently to treat for peace, at Coignac and Jarnac, with the King of Navarre and the Prince de Conde.  I know that which I have witnessed—­the tears in her eyes and the regret in her heart to which these princes would not yield; and the result we possibly see in the evils which afflict us to-day.

They have wished to accuse her of having been implicated in the War of the League.  Why, then, should she have undertaken to conclude the peace I have just mentioned, if she had been?  Why should she have appeased the riots of the barricades of Paris; and why reconciled the King with the Duc de Guise, as we have seen, if it were only to destroy the latter?

In short, no matter how much they slander her, never shall we have in France another so active in peace.

But the chief accusation against her is the massacre of Paris [of Saint Bartholomew].  All that is a sealed book to me, for I was just then setting out by boat from Brouage; but I have heard it said on good authority that she was not the prime mover in it.  Three or four others, whom I might name, were much more active in it than she, pushing her forward and making her believe, from threats made upon the wounding of Admiral Coligny, that the King was to be killed, with herself and all her children, or else that the country was to be still worse involved in arms.  Certainly the Church party were very wrong to utter such threats as they are said to have made, for they hastened the downward steps of the poor Admiral and procured his death.  If they had kept their own counsel and uttered no word, and allowed the Admiral’s wounds to heal, he could have left Paris in safety and quiet, and nothing else would have happened.  M. de La Noue has been strongly of this opinion.  Indeed, he and M. de Strozze and I have talked it over more than once, and he has never approved the bravados, the bold threats and the like which were openly made in the King’s Court and his city of Paris.  And he blamed no less strongly his brother-in-law, M. de Theligny, who was one of the hottest heads of them all, calling him a downright fool and blockhead.  The Admiral never was guilty of this loud talk, at least not in public.  I do not say that in secret or with his closest friends