When such was the measure meted out to spontaneous penitents within the time of grace, with harsher measures in reserve for those subsequently detected, we can easily imagine the feelings inspired by the Inquisition in the whole population, without distinction of creed, and the terror common to all when the rumor spread that the inquisitors were coming. Scarce any one but was conscious of some act--perhaps of neighborly charity--that rendered him a criminal to the awful fanaticism of Pierre Cella or Guillem Arnaud. The heretics themselves would look to be imprisoned for life, with confiscation, or to be burned, or sent to Constantinople to support the tottering Latin Empire; while the Catholics were likely to fare little better on the distant pilgrimages to which they were sentenced, even though they were spared the sterner punishments or the humiliation of the saffron cross. Such a visit would bring, even to the faithful, the desolation of a pestilence. The inquisitors would pass calmly on, leaving a neighborhood well-nigh depopulated--fathers and mothers despatched to distant shrines for months or years, leaving dependent families to starve, or harvests ungathered to be the prey of the first-comer, all the relations of a life, hard enough at the best, disturbed and broken up. Even such a record as that of Pierre Cella’s sentences rendered within the time of grace shows but a portion of the work. A year or two later we find the Council of Narbonne beseeching the inquisitors to delay rendering sentences of incarceration, because the numbers of those flocking in for reconciliation after the expiration of the term of grace were so great that it would be impossible to raise funds for their maintenance, or to find stones enough, even in that mountainous land, to build prisons to contain them.[37] That a whole vicinage, when it had timely notice, should bind itself in a league to defeat the purpose of the inquisitors, as at Castelnaudary, must have been a frequent experience; that, sooner or later, despair should bring about a catastrophe like that of Avignonet was inevitable. * * * * *