It being impossible any longer to employ stratagems and artifices, it would have to be done openly, and the king brought round to that way of thinking.

We agreed that, in the afternoon, we would go and pay him a visit in his closet, whither we would get the Sieur de Nevers, Marshals de Tavannes and de Retz, and Chancellor de Birague to come, merely to have their opinion as to the means to be adopted for the execution, which we had already determined upon, my mother and I." On Saturday, the 23d of August, in the afternoon, the queen-mother, the Duke of Anjou, Marshals do Tavannes and de Retz, the Duke of Nevers, and the Chancellor de Birague met in the king's closet, who was irresolute and still talking of exacting from the Guises heavy vengeance for the murderous attack upon Coligny.

Catherine "represented to him that the party of the Huguenots had already seized this occasion for taking up arms against him; they had sent," she said, "several despatches to Germany to procure a levy of ten thousand reiters, and to the cantons of the Swiss for another levy of ten thousand foot; the French captains, partisans of the Huguenots, had already, most of them, set out to raise levies within the kingdom time and place of meeting had already been assigned and determined.

All the Catholics, on their side," added Catherine, "disgusted with so long a war and harassed by so many kinds of calamities, have resolved to put a stop to them; they have decided amongst them to elect a captain-general, to form a league offensive and defensive against the Huguenots.

The whole of France would thus be seen armed and divided into two great parties, between which the king would remain isolated, without any command and with about as much obedience.
For so much ruin and calamity in anticipation and already within a finger's reach, and for the slaughter of so many thousands of men, a preventive may be found in a single sword-thrust; all that is necessary is to kill the admiral, the head and front of all the civil wars; the designs and the enterprises of the Huguenots will die with him, and the Catholics, satisfied with the sacrifice of two or three men, will remain forever in obedience to the king.