prelates and doctors of the conference transferred themselves from Mantes
to St. Denis. On Friday, July 23, in the morning, Henry wrote to Gabriel
le d'Estrees, "Sunday will be the day when I shall make the summerset
that brings down the house" (_le, saut perilleux_). A few hours after
using such flippant language to his favorite, he was having a long
conference with the prelates and doctors, putting to them the gravest
questions about the religion he was just embracing, asking them for more
satisfactory explanations on certain points, and repeating to them the
grounds of his resolution. "I am moved with compassion at the misery and
calamities of my people; I have discovered what they desire; and I wish
to be enabled, with a safe conscience, to content them." At the end of
the conference, "Gentlemen," he said, "I this day commit my soul to your
keeping; I pray you, take heed to it, for, wheresoever you are causing me
to enter, I shall never more depart till death; that I swear and protest
to you;" and, in a voice of deep emotion, his eyes dim with tears, "I
desire no further delay; I wish to be received on Sunday and go to mass;
draw up the profession of faith you think I ought to make, and bring it
to me this evening; "when the Archbishop of Bourges and the Bishops of Le
Mans and Evreux brought it to him on the Saturday morning, he discussed
it apart with them, demanding the cutting out of some parts which struck
too directly at his previous creed and life; and Chancellor de Chiverny
and two presidents of the Parliament, Harlay and Groulart, used their
intervention to have him satisfied. The profession of faith was
modified. Next day, Sunday, the 25th of July, before he got up, Henry
conversed with the Protestant minister Anthony de la Faye, and embraced
him two or three times, repeating to him the words already quoted,
"I have made myself anathema for the sake of all, like Moses and St.
Paul." A painful mixture of the frivolous and the serious, of sincerity
and captious reservations, of resolution and weakness, at which nobody
has any right to be shocked who is not determined to be pitiless towards