. A
special messenger was despatched to Montigny with the intercepted
correspondence, accompanied by an earnest prayer that he would not
contaminate his sword and his noble name by subserviency to men who
despised even while they purchased traitors. That noble, both confounded
and exasperated, was for a moment inclined to listen to the voice of
honor and patriotism, but reflection and solitude induced him to pocket
up his wrongs and his "merced" together. The states-general also sent the
correspondence to the Walloon provincial authorities, with an eloquent
address, begging them to study well the pitiful part which La Motte had
enacted in the private comedy then performing, and to behold as in a
mirror their own position, if they did not recede ere it was too late.

The only important effect produced by the discovery was upon the Prior of
Renty himself. Ottavio Gonzaga, the intimate friend of Don John, and now
high in the confidence of Parma, wrote to La Motte, indignantly denying
the truth of Bien Aime's tattle, and affirming that not a word had ever
been uttered by himself or by any gentleman in his presence to the
disparagement of the Governor of Gravelines. He added that if the Prior
had worn another coat, and were of quality equal to his own, he would
have made him eat his words or a few inches of steel. In the same
vehement terms he addressed a letter to Bien Aime himself. Very soon
afterwards, notwithstanding his coat and his quality, that unfortunate
ecclesiastic found himself beset one dark night by two soldiers, who left
him, severely wounded and bleeding nearly to death upon the high road,
but escaping with life, he wrote to Parma, recounting his wrongs and the
"sword-thrust in his left thigh," and made a demand for a merced.

The Prior recovered from this difficulty only to fall into another, by
publishing what he called an apologue, in which he charged that the
reconciled nobles were equally false to the royal and to the rebel
government, and that, although "the fatted calf had been killed for them,
after they had so long been feeding with perverse heretical pigs," they
were, in truth, as mutinous as ever, being bent upon establishing an
oligarchy in the Netherlands, and dividing the territory among
themselves, to the exclusion of the sovereign. This naturally excited the
wrath of the Viscount and others. The Seigneur d'Auberlieu, in a letter
written in what the writer himself called the "gross style of a