A rare example of a party-chief completely awakened and tamed by experience: it made him disgusted with fanaticism, faction, civil war, and complicity with the foreigner.

He was the least brilliant but the most sensible, the most honest, and the most French of the Guises.

Henry IV., when seriously ill at Fontainebleau in 1608, recommended him to Queen Mary de' Medici as one of the men whom it was most important to call to the councils of state; and, at the approach of death, Mayenne, weary and weak in the lap of repose, could conscientiously address those who were around him in such grand and Christian language as this: "It is no new thing to know that I must die; for twelve years past my lingering and painful life has been for the most part an apprenticeship thereto.

My sufferings have so dulled the sting of death that I rather count upon it than dread it; happy to have had so long a delay to teach me to make a good end, and to rid me of the things which formerly kept me from that knowledge.

Happy to meet my end amongst mine own people and to terminate by a peaceful death the sufferings and miseries of my life.