at the Pope refused to
ratify it; because, though it would not have made my resignation a jot
more binding, yet it would have procured my liberty. I proposed
expedients to the Holy See by which the Court might do it with honour,
but the Pope was inflexible. He thought it would damage his reputation
to consent to a violence so injurious to the whole Church, and said to my
friends, who begged his consent with tears in their eyes, that he could
never consent to a resignation extorted from a prisoner by force.

After several consultations with my friends how to make my escape, I
effected it on August the 8th, at five o'clock in the evening. I let
myself down to the bottom of the bastion, which was forty feet high, with
a rope, while my valet de chambre treated the guards with as much liquor
as they could drink. Their attention, was, moreover, taken up with
looking at a Jacobin friar who happened to be drowned as he was bathing.
A sentinel, seeing me, was taking up his musket to fire, but dropped it
upon my threatening to have him hanged; and he said, upon examination,
that he believed Marechal de La Meilleraye was in concert with me. Two
pages who were washing themselves, saw me also, and called out, but were
not heard. My four gentlemen waited for me at the bottom of the ravelin,
on pretence of watering their horses, so that I was on horseback before
the least notice was taken; and, having forty fresh horses planted on the
road, I might have reached Paris very soon if my horse had not fallen and
caused me to break my shoulder bone, the pain of which was so extreme
that I nearly fainted several times. Not being able to continue my
journey, I was lodged, with only one of my gentlemen, in a great
haystack, while MM. de Brissac and Joly went straight to Beaupreau, to
assemble the nobility, there, in order to rescue me. I lay hid there for
over seven hours in inexpressible misery, for the pain from my injury
threw me into a fever, during which my thirst was much augmented by the
smell of the new hay; but, though we were by a riverside, we durst not
venture out for water, because there was nobody to put the stack in order
again, which would very probably have occasioned suspicion and a search
in consequence. We heard nothing but horsemen riding by, who, we were
afterwards informed, were Marechal de La Meilleraye's scouts. About two
o'clock in the morning I was fetched out of the stack by a Parisian of
quality sent by my