the Guises so long as
you remain here; and they have in like manner promised to respect you and
all yours. I am fully persuaded that you will keep your word; but I am not
so well assured of their good faith as of yours; for, besides the fact
that it is they that would avenge themselves, I know their bravadoes and
the favor this populace bears to them."[945]

[Sidenote: Coligny is wounded, August 22.]

On Friday morning, the twenty-second of August, Admiral Coligny went to
the Louvre, to attend a meeting of the royal council, at which Henry of
Anjou presided. It was between ten and eleven o'clock, when, according to
the more primitive hours then kept, he left the palace to return home for
dinner.[946] Meeting Charles just coming out of a chapel in front of the
Louvre, he retraced his steps, and accompanied him to the tennis-court,
where he left him playing with Guise, against Teligny and another
nobleman. Accompanied by about a dozen gentlemen, he again sallied forth,
but had not proceeded over a hundred paces when from behind a lattice an
arquebuse was fired at him.[947] The admiral had been walking slowly,
intently engaged in reading a petition which had just been handed to him.
The shot had been well aimed, and might have proved fatal, had not the
victim at that very moment turned a little to one side. As it was, of the
three balls with which the arquebuse was loaded, one took off a finger of
his right hand, and another lodged in his left arm, making an ugly wound.
Supported by De Guerchy and Des Pruneaux, between whom he had previously
been walking, Coligny was carried to his house in the little Rue de
Bethisy,[948] only a few steps farther on. As he went he pointed out to
his friends the house from which the shot had been fired. To a gentleman
who expressed the fear that the balls were poisoned, he replied with
composure: "Nothing will happen but what it may please God to order."[949]

The attempted assassination had happened in front of the cloisters of St.
Germain l'Auxerrois. The house was recognized as one belonging to the
Duchess Dowager of Guise, in which Villemur, the former tutor of young
Henry of Guise, had lodged. The door was found locked; but the indignant
followers of Coligny soon burst it open. They found within only a woman
and a lackey. The assassin, after firing, had fled to the rear of the
house. There he found a horse awaiting him; this he exchanged at the Porte
Saint Antoine for a fresh Spanish