The most infamous baseness ensued. Such and such a favourite, such and such a courtesan, obtained as the price of the most disgraceful services, the spoils of a family, or even of an entire canton. The property of the victims was fought for and disputed in open day, before the whole country. Heretics were denounced, and in default were invented, that there might be more goods to confiscate; and many abbeys and noble families by this means enlarged their domains, as they did later on the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. They have since lost their ill-gotten acquisitions. The judgments of God have their day of execution! The Edict of Châteaubriant was not enough. Pope Paul IV., the Cardinal de Lorraine, the Sorbonne, a multitude of priests, demanded that France should become a land of inquisition. A bull to this effect was despatched in 1557, and the king confirmed it by an edict. But in vain did he attempt to force it upon the Parliament in session: the lay magistrates temporized, adjourned, and in the midst of so many disgraces, France was spared this one at least. Exasperated by these delays, the impetuous Paul IV., whose head, it is said, was deranged with old age, fulminated a bull, in which he declared that all who lapsed into heresy, prelates, princes, even kings and emperors, should be shorn of their benefices, dignities, states, and empires, which he would bestow upon the first Catholic occupant, without even retaining to the Holy See the power of restitution. Paul IV. mistook the age: under the pontificate of Gregory VII. or of Innocent III., such a bull would have set all Europe on fire; under his, it was only an act of folly. But in default of the Inquisition, the Sorbonne and the clergy, who had constituted hatred of heretics the first, and the most sacred of duties, neglected nothing to inflame every mind with implacable fanaticism. Its effects may be seen in the affair of the Rue Saint Jacques, which happened in the beginning of the month of September, 1557. The battle of Saint Quentin had just been lost. Arms had been distributed among the people with orders to be ready for any event. Every one fancied the Spaniard at the gates of Paris, and general terror ascribed the disaster to the mildness with which the heretics had been treated. “We have not sufficiently avenged the honour of God, and God takes vengeance upon us,” cried with the same voice both the populace and churchmen. So, when Rome was attacked by the barbarians, the Pagans accused themselves of having been too considerate towards the Christians. So, when Paris was menaced in 1792, after the taking of Verdun, the self-accusation was that the aristocracy and clergy had been too much spared, and the result was the days of September. The raging of the passions is always the same.