However this be, the Jansenists, treated at their death as excommunicated persons, rose up against this new persecution. The parliament, which had registered the bull with a very ill will, undertook their defence; it banished the fathers who refused the communion to dieing Jansenists: the archbishop, on his side, forbad them, and deprived of their places those priests who obeyed the parliament; and the unhappy _God-Bearers_ (so they are called) having before their eyes exile on one side, and famine on the other, found themselves under a melancholy alternative. Reasonable people were surprised that the archbishop, the author of their misfortune, did not go and present himself to the parliament, declare that they had done nothing but by his orders, and give himself up as a victim for so many innocents. They had so much the more reason to expect this, as the virtue of that prelate, and his sincerity in this affair, were by no means suspected. The Jansenists called him persecutor and schismatick; the courtiers, obstinate: his partisans compared him to St. Athanasius, who was also (they said) called obstinate and rebellious by the courtiers of his time. The dispute grew more and more warm: the court wished ineffectually to put a stop to it; the Jansenists had found means to occasion more trouble in their deaths than they had done during their lives; the parliaments and the arch-bishop were exiled by turns. At last the king, justly tired of these disputes, recalled the magistrates, and in concert with them imposed alike silence on the partisans and on the adversaries of the bull. This law of silence, it is true, was not too well observed; it was particularly broken by the encomiums which the Jansenists bestowed on it: they printed large volumes to prove that it was necessary to be silent; they resembled the Pedant in Moliere, who after having talked a long time, and said abundance of foolish things, promises at last to keep silence[13], and in order to shew that he maintains his promise, interrupts every moment the conversation, by observing _that he opens not his mouth_. The constitutionists on their side had the presumption to say, that the King had no right to ordain mad subjects to be silent on the ridiculous object which heated their imaginations; that the sixth general council had _anathematized_ the _type_ of the emperor Constantius, which was also, as they pretended, nothing more than a _law of silence_. The Jansenists replyed, that this council had done better still, in _anathematizing_ Pope Honorius.