We are almost always ready to cut one another's throats.

We wear daggers, shirts of mail, and very often the whole cuirass under the cape.

I am only waiting for the opportunity to deliver a little battle, for they tell me they will kill me, and I want to be beforehand." Mesdames de Carnavalet and de Sauve, two of his fair friends, had warned him that, far from giving him the lieutenant-generalship, which had been so often promised him, it had been decided to confer this office on the king's brother, in order to get him back to court and seize his person as soon as he arrived.
It was the increasing preponderance of the Guises, at court as well as in the country, which caused the two princes to take this sudden resolution.
Since Henry III.'s coming to the throne, war had gone on between the Catholics and the Protestants, but languidly and with frequent suspensions through local and shortlived truces.

The king and the queen-mother would have been very glad that the St.Bartholomew should be short-lived also, as a necessary but transitory crisis; it had rid them of their most formidable adversaries, Coligny and the Reformers of note who were about him.

Henry and Catherine aspired to no more than resuming their policy of manoeuvring and wavering between the two parties engaged in the struggle; but it was not for so poor a result that the ardent Catholics had committed the crime of the St.Bartholomew; they promised themselves from it the decisive victory of their church and of their supremacy.