Note 993 — Chapter XVIII

Of this memorable enterprise Coligny has left "Mémoires" which are contained in the collection of Petitot, etc. It is the only military treatise we possess coming from the admiral's hand, and it enters into the subject with technical minuteness. The destruction by his royal murderers of the admiral's papers (including diaries that would have thrown great light upon the transactions of the last two years of his life), see Vita Gasparis Colinii (1575), i. 138, was an irretrievable loss to history. We are told also of a much more recent act of vandalism, not even palliated by the miserable excuse of political expediency: "In 1810, an inhabitant of Châtillon having discovered in the solitary remaining tower of the old castle a walled chamber wherein were the archives of the Coligny family and of the family of Luxemburg, burned all the papers from motives of private interest. Some fragments that escaped this conflagration, and which are preserved in the mairie, prove that a correspondence between Catharine de' Medici and Coligny had been laid away in this repository." Bulletin de la Société de l'histoire du prot. français, iii. (1854) 351.