The misery in the place became frightful; the poor died of hunger, or were cut down by the soldiery when they ventured upon shore at low tide to look for cockles; the price of provisions was such that the richest alone could get a little meat to eat; a cow fetched two thousand livres, and a bushel of wheat eight hundred livres. Madame de Rohan had been the first to have her horses killed, but this resource was exhausted, and her cook at last “left the town and allowed himself to be taken, saying that he would rather be hanged than return to die of hunger.” A rising even took place amongst the inhabitants who were clamorous to surrender, but Guiton had the revolters hanged. “I am ready,” said he, “to cast lots with anybody else which shall live or be killed to feed his comrade with his flesh. As long as there is one left to keep the gates shut, it is enough.” The mutineers were seized with terror, and men died without daring to speak. “We have been waiting three months for the effect of the excellent letters we received from the King of Great Britain,” wrote Guiton on the 24th of August, to the deputies from La Rochelle who were in London, “and, meanwhile, we cannot see by what disasters it happens that we remain here in misery without seeing any sign of succor; our men can do no more, our inhabitants are dying of hunger in the streets, and all our families are in a fearful state from mourning, want, and perplexity; nevertheless, we will hold out to the last day, but in God’s name delay no longer, for we perish.” This letter never reached its destination; the watchmaker, Marc Biron; who had offered to convey it to England, was arrested whilst attempting to pass the royal lines, and was immediately hanged. La Rochelle, however, still held out. “Their rabid fury,” says the cardinal, “gave them new strength, or rather the avenging wrath of God caused them to be supplied therewith in extraordinary measure by his evil spirit, in order to prolong their woes; they were already almost at the end thereof, and misery found upon them no more substance whereon it could feed and support itself; they were skeletons, empty shadows, breathing corpses, rather than living men.” At the bottom of his heart, and in spite of the ill temper their resistance caused in him, the heroism of the Rochellese excited the cardinal’s admiration. Buckingham had just been assassinated. “The king could not have lost a more bitter or a more idiotic enemy; his unreasoning enterprises ended unluckily, but they, nevertheless, did not fail to put us in great peril and cause us much mischief,” says Richelieu “the idiotic madness of an enemy being more to be feared than his wisdom, inasmuch as the idiot does not act on any principle common to other men, he attempts everything and anything, violates his own interests, and is restrained by impossibility alone.”