Under this varying policy the fate of the people of Languedoc was hard. Nicholas d’Abbeville, the Inquisitor of Carcassonne, was a man of inflexible severity, arrogantly bent on pushing his prerogatives to the utmost. He had an assistant worthy of him in Foulques de Saint-Georges, the Prior of the Convent of Albi, which was under his jurisdiction. He had virtually another assistant in the bishop, Bernard de Castanet, who delighted to act as inquisitor, impelled alike by fanaticism and by greed, for, as we have seen, the bishops of Albi, by a special transaction with St. Louis, enjoyed a half of the confiscations. Prior to his elevation in 1276 Bernard had been auditor of the papal camera, which shows him to have been an accomplished legist, and he was also a patron of art and literature, but he was ever in trouble with his people. Already, in 1277, he had succeeded in so exasperating them that his palace was swept by a howling mob, and he barely escaped with his life. In 1282 he commenced the erection of the cathedral of St. Cecilia, a gigantic building, half church, half fortress, which swallowed enormous sums, and stimulated his hatred of heresy by supplying a pious use for the estates of heretics.[74] To such men the protection granted to his subjects by Philippe was most distasteful, and not without reason. Heretics naturally took advantage of the restrictions imposed on the Inquisition and redoubled their activity. It might seem, indeed, to them that the day of supremacy of the Church was past, and that the rising independence of the secular power might usher in an era of comparative toleration, in which their persecuted religion would at length find its oft-deferred opportunity of converting mankind--a dream in which they indulged to the last. More demonstrative, if not more earnest, was the feeling which the royal policy aroused in Carcassonne. The Ordonnances had not only crippled the Inquisition, but had shown the disfavor with which it was regarded by the king, and in 1295 some of the leading citizens, who had been compromised in the trials of 1285, found no difficulty in arousing the people to open resistance. For a while they controlled the city, and inflicted no little injury on the Dominicans, and on all who ventured to support them. Nicholas d’Abbeville was driven from the pulpit when preaching, pelted with stones and pursued with drawn swords, and the judges of the royal court on one occasion were glad to escape with their lives, while the friars were beaten and insulted when they appeared in public and were practically segregated as excommunicates. Bernard Gui, an eye-witness, naturally attributes this to the influence of heresy, but it is impossible for us now to conjecture how much may have been due to religious antagonism, and how much to the natural reaction among the orthodox against the intolerable oppression of the inquisitorial methods.[75]