The furniture, the gold and silver, coined or other, the merchandise, and the horses passed over to the disposal of the Duke of Guise.

Lastly the vanquished, when they quitted the town, were to leave it intact, having no power to pull down houses, unpave streets, throw up earth, displace a single stone, pull out a single nail.

The conqueror's precautions were as deliberate as his audacity had been sudden.

On the 9th of January, 1558, after a week's siege, Calais, which had been in the hands of the English for two hundred and ten years, once more became a French town, in spite of the inscription which was engraved on one of its gates, and which may be turned into the following distich:-- "A siege of Calais may seem good When lead and iron swim like wood." The joy was so much the greater in that it was accompanied by great surprise: save a few members of the king's council, nobody expected this conquest.

"I certainly thought that you must be occupied in preparing for some great exploit, and that you wished to wait until you could apprise me of the execution rather than the design," wrote Marshal de Brissac to the Duke of Guise, on the 22d of January, from Italy.
Foreigners were not less surprised than the French themselves; they had supposed that France would remain for a long while under the effects of the reverse experienced at Saint-Quentin.