After this there was nothing more to be discussed, and the conference terminated on the 9th of October. One thing alone was made clear:—that the hope of bringing the two communions together by mutual concessions was illusory, and that nothing remained but either to let one exterminate the other, or to allow them to live side by side. This last idea, so little understood at that time, began to dawn upon a few superior intellects, and especially in that of the Chancellor l’Hospital, as we shall presently see. III. Notwithstanding the unhappy issue of the conference of Poissy, the courage of the Reformed party rose greatly, because they had had the advantage of setting forth their faith before the chiefs of the kingdom and the princes of the Roman (Catholic) Church. It was no longer possible to accuse them of infamous crimes, or to give them up without form of law to the sword of the executioner. The timid and the undecided flew to the standard of the Reformation, and a movement, like those we have already described on other occasions, was once more seen. Some important towns, Milhau, Sainte Foy, Lacaune, and hundreds of villages cut themselves off at one stroke from (Roman) Catholicism. One pastor named Beaulieu announced to Farel that three hundred parishes of L’Agenois had _put down the mass_. “I have heard persons worthy of belief say,” he wrote, “that if there could be found on this very day four thousand, or even six thousand ministers of the Lord, they would all be employed.” Admitting that there is some exaggeration in this, the progress would still have been considerable. The aged Farel returned for some time to his native country, and passing by Grenoble, exhorted the faithful to hold their meetings in the open air. Another preacher of great reputation at Geneva, Pierre Viret, came to Nismes in the month of October, 1561, and the day after his arrival, eight thousand auditors crowded round the foot of his pulpit. He was suffering from the effects of two attempts at assassination. A female domestic, gained by some monks, had tried to poison him at Geneva; and a priest of the Pays de Vaud, having attacked him on the highway, had so beaten him that he had been left for dead upon the spot. “To look at me,” he wrote at a later period, referring to his first sermon at Nismes, “I appeared like a dry anatomy covered with skin, who had taken my bones there to be buried; so much so, that even those who were not of our religion, but strongly opposed to it, pitied me and said: ‘What is this poor man come to do in our country? Has he come here to die?’ And I have even heard that, when I ascended the pulpit for the first time, many seeing me feared that I should faint before I could finish my sermon.”