Monsieur du Plessis Mornay, the great Huguenot leader and governor of Saumur, of which he had made a powerful Protestant stronghold, did his utmost to dissuade de la Trémoille from going to Court. “Excepting,” he said, “for those words which escaped you, I see no reason for your going.”
“But if I can be employed?” rejoined the more than willing de la Trémoille.
Du Plessis replied only by a stern, half-scornful silence, and went back to his château at Bonmoy near Saumur; but hardly had he arrived there, than he received a letter from Madame de la Trémoille, informing him that her husband had been seized with gout in the arm, and praying that if there should be no speedy improvement in his condition, du Plessis would come to him. On the following night, she further wrote that if he desired to see his friend alive, he must come quickly.
Du Plessis immediately hastened to Thonars, to find Monsieur de la Trémoille exhausted with fever, and gasping with semi-suffocation. He, however, rallied sufficiently to evince great pleasure at the sight of Monsieur du Plessis, “uttering with effort a few words, in which he displayed all his ordinary sense and judgment.” He was further able to recommend to his friend’s care his wife and four children, who were thus losing him while still so young. But the distractions of this life were fast slipping away from the dying man, and it was chiefly upon his soul’s welfare that Du Plessis conversed with him.
“It is not for me,” said de la Trémoille, “to speak of anything but that”; and, unheeding all else, he mustered his remaining strength and speech to discuss the life to come—replying always with words that showed his courage in the face of death, the assurance of his faith in Christ, and displaying the sound judgment which had distinguished him in the days of his health.
While de la Trémoille was thus struggling in the agonies of death, his daughter Charlotte lay ill with an attack of smallpox; and the distracted Duchess only left her husband’s bedside to tend the suffering child.
In the midst of all this trouble a message was brought her that her sister-in-law, the Princess de Condé, desired to speak with her. The Princess, she was told, had met with a mishap in the breaking-down of her coach upon the road near Thonars, and she asked her sister-in-law for the loan of her carriage. Little cordiality existed at this time between the Princess and her brother. Damaging reports of her had recently circulated. She was suspected in the first place of having poisoned her husband. She had, moreover, found difficulty in establishing proofs of the legitimacy of the son born to her after the Prince’s death. In addition to this, she had forsworn the Reformed faith, and given up her son, the little Prince de Condé, into the hands of the King to be reared in the Catholic creed.
Whether the Princess really wanted the coach in order to proceed on her journey, or whether she magnified the accident for the reason of the opportunity it afforded her of becoming reconciled to her brother, probably she alone knew; but in any case her visit was too late for that. Monsieur de la Trémoille was already speechless. “I cannot see her,” cried the Duchess, and she piteously entreated Monsieur du Plessis not to allow the Princess to enter the château. Du Plessis hesitated. He knew that the poor wife’s hopes that her husband might recover were vain. He thought it possible that the solemnity of the scene of her brother’s death-bed might exercise a salutary effect upon his sister’s mind; but the distress of the Duchess conquered him; and he wrote a respectful letter to the Princess begging her to defer her visit.
Thus Madame de Condé continued her journey to Paris without coming to Thonars; but she laid the blame of the refusal on Monsieur du Plessis, who found some difficulty in clearing himself with the King, for the affront that she considered she had received.
In the meantime, the Duke expired, aged only thirty-eight years. He left his wife and children under the guardianship of the Elector-palatine, of Prince Maurice of Nassau, of the Duke de Bouillon, and of Monsieur du Plessis. He desired on his death-bed that his children should be brought up in the Reformed faith.