On the 19th of April, in obedience to the summons of the vice-legate, this army of executioners entered the county of Venasque, belonging to the pope, and fresh bodies of banditti hastened thither under the guidance of priests. The town of Cabrières was besieged. Sixty men, who alone had remained there, held out for twenty-four hours. On the promise of their lives, they came forth unarmed, and were immediately hacked to pieces. Their women, shut up in a barn, were burned alive. A soldier, moved to pity, tried to open them a passage, but they were driven back into the flames with the halbert. The church of Cabrières was profaned with infamous debauches; and the steps of the altar were inundated with blood. The clergy of Avignon blessed the murderers: they had pronounced a sentence decreeing no quarter. The day was to come when the _glacière_ of Avignon should count other victims. There is justice upon earth for the privileged classes, who abuse their power: it is sometimes tardy, but it is sure. The Vaudois perished in numbers in their wild retreats. The vice-legate and the Parliament of Aix had forbidden, under pain of death, that any shelter or food should be given them, “which,” says Bouche, the historian of Provence, “was the means of killing a very great many.” Numbers of the unhappy people supplicated D’Oppède to accord them permission to depart, even with nothing but their shirts. “I know what I have to do with this people of Mérindol and their like,” answered he: “I will send them to dwell in hell, them and their children.” Two hundred and fifty prisoners were put to death, after a mock trial; a more atrocious act than the massacre, since it was committed in cold blood. Others, the youngest and more robust, were sent to the galleys. A few succeeded in gaining the frontiers of Switzerland. The name of the Vaudois disappeared almost entirely from Provence, and their country relapsed into as desolate a wilderness as it was three centuries before. History has preserved the pious words uttered by the Vaudois, who had taken refuge with their pastors in the mountain gorges. Prepared for death, and beholding in the distance the blazing ruins of their dwellings, the old and young thus exhorted each other: “The least of our cares should be for our property and our lives; the greatest and chiefest fear that ought to fill us with emotion, is lest we fail in the confession of our Lord Jesus Christ and his holy Gospel. Let us call on God, and he will have pity upon us.”