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CHAPTER X · He dismisses his escort.
The strictest orders had been given to the commandants of important points, such as Bordeaux and Poitiers, through which Antoine might intend passing, to guard them against him, in case of his showing any inclination to come otherwise than peaceably. These precautions, however, proved unnecessary. Antoine intended to by his engagement. When by slow stages he had at length reached Limoges, he found a number of friendly noblemen awaiting him. In a few days more seven or eight hundred gentlemen had come in, well equipped and armed. They begged him at once to declare for the liberation of France, according to his previous promises. The nobility, they said, were only waiting for the word of command. Meanwhile Gascony, Poitou, and the coasts offered six or seven thousand foot soldiers, already enrolled under captains, and prepared to defend him against present attack. Provence and Languedoc would march to his assistance with three or four thousand horse and foot. Normandy would raise as many more. He would at once become so formidable that, without a blow, he could assume the guardianship of the king. Bourges and Orleans would fall into his hands, and the States General be held free of constraint. The very forces of the enemy would desert the sinking cause of the hated Guises. As for the necessary funds, with the best filled purses in France at his command, he could scarcely feel any lack. The suggestions of the Huguenot lords, backed by the entreaties of Beza, were, however, overborne by the secret insinuations of his treacherous counsellors. At Verteuil—a few leagues beyond—Navarre clearly announced his intentions, and dismissed his numerous friends with hearty thanks for their kind attentions. He would ask the king's pardon for those who had accompanied him thus far in arms. "Pardon!" replied one of the gentlemen, "think only of very humbly asking it for yourself, who are going to give yourself up as a prisoner with the halter around your neck. So far as I can see, you have more need of it than we have, who have determined not to sell our lives at so cheap a rate, but to die fighting rather than submit to the mercy of those detested enemies of the king. And since we are miserably forsaken by our leaders, we hope that God will raise up others to free us from the oppression of these tyrants." This retort proving futile, as did also the warning of the Princess of Condé, who wrote and sent a messenger to her husband to escape from the toils of his enemies while it was still possible, the Huguenot gentry retired in disgust; and Beza seized the first opportunity (on the seventeenth of October) to steal away from the King of Navarre, and undertake his perilous return to Geneva, which he succeeded in reaching after a series of hair-breadth escapes.
