Note 932 — Chapter XVIII

I had translated this letter from the copy given by the Mémoires de l'estat de France (apud Archives curieuses, vii. 80, 81), which agrees substantially with, and was probably derived from, the version given in Hotman's Gasparis Colinii Vita (1575), 106, 107. On comparing it, however, with the transcript of the original autograph in the remarkable collection of the late Col. Henri Tronchin, given by M. Jules Bonnet in the Bulletin de la Soc. de l'hist. du prot. français, i. (1853), 369, I discover extraordinary discrepancies, and find that, in addition to a different phraseology in every sentence, one clause is inserted by Hotman of which there is not a trace in the Tronchin MS. I refer to the words: "Soyez asseurée de ma part que, parmi ces festins et passe-temps, je ne donneray fascherie à personne"—which would, of course, point to the prevailing fears of a collision between the admiral and the young Duke of Guise, or his retainers, whose hatred of Coligny was so well known that Charles IX. had issued a special injunction to the parties to keep the peace. The letter contains at the commencement of the postscript a playful allusion to the hope of his wife soon to be a mother.