presented themselves.  The King had fastened a great white plume to his helmet, and had adorned his horse’s head with another, equally conspicuous.  “Comrades!” he now exclaimed to those about him, “Comrades!  God is for us!  There are his enemies and ours!  If you lose sight of your standards, rally to my white plume; you will find it on the road to victory and to honor.”  The Huguenots had knelt after their fashion; again Gabriel d’Amours had offered for them a prayer to the God of battles:  but no Joyeuse dreamed of suspecting that they were meditating surrender or flight.  The King, with the brave Huguenot minister’s prediction of victory still ringing in his ears, plunged into the thickest of the fight, two horses’ length ahead of his companions.  That moment he forgot that he was King of France and general-in-chief, both in one, and fought as if he were a private soldier.  It was indeed a bold venture.  True, the enemy, partly because of the confusion induced by the reiters, partly from the rapidity of the King’s movements, had lost in some measure the advantage they should have derived from their lances, and were compelled to rely mainly upon their swords, as against the firearms of their opponents.  Still, they outnumbered the knights of the King’s squadron more than as two to one.  No wonder that some of the latter flinched and actually turned back; especially when the standard-bearer of the King, receiving a deadly wound in the face, lost control of his horse, and went riding aimlessly about the field, still grasping the banner in grim desperation.  But the greater number emulated the courage of their leader.  The white plume kept them in the road to victory and to honor.  Yet even this beacon seemed at one moment to fail them.  Another cavalier, who had ostentatiously decorated his helmet much after the same fashion as the King, was slain in the hand-to-hand conflict, and some, both of the Huguenots and of their enemies, for a time supposed the great Protestant champion himself to have fallen.

But although fiercely contested, the conflict was not long.  The troopers of Mayenne wavered, and finally fled.  Henry of Navarre emerged from the confusion, to the great relief of his anxious followers, safe and sound, covered with dust and blood not his own.  More than once he had been in great personal peril.  On his return from the melee, he halted, with a handful of companions, under the pear-trees indicated beforehand as a rallying-point, when he was descried and attacked by three bands of Walloon horse that had not yet engaged in the fight.  Only his own valor and the timely arrival of some of his troops saved the imprudent monarch from death or captivity.