Three weeks before the battle, on the 13th of September, Coligny had been sentenced to death by the Parliament of Paris, and hanged in effigy on the Place de Greve; and a reward of fifty thousand gold crowns had been offered to whosoever should give him up to the king's justice dead or alive, words added, it is said, to the decree at the desire of Charles IX.himself.

Family sorrows were in Coligny's case added to political reverses; on the 27th of May, in this same year 1569, he had lost his brother D'Andelot, his faithful comrade in his religious as well as his warlike career.

"He found himself," says D'Aubigne, "saddled with the blame due to accident, his own merits being passed over in silence; with the remnant of an army which, when it was whole, was in despair even before the late disaster; with weak towns, dismayed garrisons, and foreigners without baggage; himself moneyless, his enemies very powerful, and pitiless towards all, especially towards him; abandoned by all the great, except one woman, the Queen of Navarre, who, having nothing but the title, had advanced to Niort in order to lend a hand to the afflicted and to affairs in general.

This old man, worn down by fever, endured all these causes of anguish and many others that came to rack him more painfully than his grievous wound.

As he was being borne along in a litter, Lestrange, an old nobleman, and one of his principal counsellors, travelling in similar fashion, and wounded likewise, had his own litter, where the road was broad, moved forward in front of the admiral's, and putting his head out at the door, he looked steadily at his chief, saying, with tears in his eyes, 'Yet God is very merciful.' Thereupon they bade one another farewell, perfectly at one in thought, without being able to say more.