His indecision brought him to a state of impotence, and he ended by inability to do anything but dodge and lie, like his mother, and even with his mother.

Whilst he was getting his sister married to the King of Navarre and concerting his policy with Coligny, he was adopting towards the three principal personages who came to talk over those affairs with him three different sorts of language; to Cardinal Alessandrino, whom Pope Pius V.
had sent to him to oppose the marriage, he said, "My lord cardinal, all that you say to me is sound; I acknowledge it, and I thank the pope and you for it; if I had any other means of taking vengeance on my enemies, I would not make this marriage; but I have no other." With Jeanne d'Albret, he lauded himself for the marriage as the best policy he could pursue.

"I give my sister," he said, "not to the Prince of Navarre, but to all the Huguenots, to marry them as it were, and take from them all doubt as to the unchangeable fixity of my edicts." And to humor his mother Catherine, he said to her, on the very evening of his interview with Jeanne d'Albret, "What think you, madam?
Do I not play my partlet well ?" "Yes, very well; but it is nothing if it is not continued." And Charles continued to play his part, even after the Bartholomew was over, for he was fond of saying with a laugh, "My big sister Margot caught all those Huguenot rebels in the bird-catching style.

What has grieved me most is being obliged to dissimulate so long." His contemporary Catholic biographer, Papirius Masson, who was twenty-eight years old at the time of the St.Bartholomew, says of him, "He is impatient in waiting, ferocious in his fits of anger, skilfully masked when he wishes, and ready to break faith as soon as that appears to his advantage." [Illustration: Charles IX.

and Catherine de' Medici----354] Such was the prince, fiery and flighty, inconsistent and artful, accessible to the most opposite sympathies as well as hatreds, of whom Catherine de' Medici and Admiral Coligny were disputing the possession.
In the spring of 1572 Coligny might have considered himself the victor in this struggle; at his instance Charles IX.