The two great lords, who were waiting for it, turned over the corpse, wiped the blood off the face, and said, "Faith, 'tis he, sure enough." [Illustration: Henry de Guise and the Corpse of Coligny----369] Some have said that Guise gave him a kick in the face.

A servant of the Duke of Nevers cut off the head, and took it to the queen-mother, the king, and the Duke of Anjou.

It was embalmed with care, to be sent, it is said, to Rome.

What is certain is that, a few days afterwards, Mandelot, governor of Lyons, wrote to the king, "I have received, sir, the letter your Majesty was pleased to write to me, whereby you tell me that you have been advertised that there is a man who has set out from over yonder with the head he took from the admiral after killing him, for to convey it to Rome, and to take care, when the said man arrives in this city, to have him arrested, and to take from him the said head.
Whereupon I incontinently gave such strict orders, that, if he presents himself, the command which it pleases your Majesty to lay upon me will be acted upon.

There hath not passed, for these last few days, by way of this city, any person going Romewards save a squire of the Duke of Guise's, named Paule, the which had departed four hours previously on the same day on which I received the said letter from your Majesty." We do not find anywhere, in reference to this incident, any information going further than this reply of the governor of Lyons to Charles IX.
However it may be, the remains of Coligny's body, after having been hung and exposed for some days on the gibbet of Montfaucon, were removed by Duke Francis de Montmorency, the admiral's relative and friend, who had them transferred to Chantilly and interred in the chapel of the castle.
After having been subjected, in the course of three centuries, at one time to oblivion and at others to divers transferences, these sad relics of a great man, a great Christian, and a great patriot, have been resting, for the last two and twenty years, in the very castle of Chatillon-sur-Loing, his ancestors' own domain having once more become the property of a relative of his family, the Duke of Luxembourg, to whom Count Anatole de Montesquiou transferred them, and who, in 1851, had them sealed up in a bit of wall in ruins, at the foot of an old tower, under the site of the bed-chamber of the Duchesses of Chatillon, where, in all probability, Coligny was born.