He inquired into the cause of the disturbance, and learning that the meeting had been held for reading the Bible, to celebrate the Supper, to pray for the king and the prosperity of the kingdom, he was moved to tears. Yet he must acquit himself of his duty. He had the men brought forth first bound two and two: they were insulted and beaten, those above all who, by their beards or their long dresses, seemed to be preachers. He would have kept the women in the house; but the populace threatened to fire it. They came out in their turn, to be overwhelmed with cowardly outrages, their clothes rent to shreds, their hair torn from their heads, to reach the prison of the Châtelet, covered with dirt and gore, to the number of about a hundred and forty victims. The most execrable aspersions were hawked about against the new believers, in the pulpits, in the confessionals, in the colleges, in the market-places, at the court itself. Invention had not been much taxed: it was word for word the old calumnies of the Pagans against the meetings of the early Christians. The heretics were accused of not believing in God, of immolating little children, of extinguishing the lights.... I desist from saying more: let the history of the primitive church be read! And as it seems necessary that in human affairs the ridiculous should always place itself beside the tragic, a certain bishop of Avranches distributed a tract throughout all Paris, in which, comparing the sound of the bells of the Catholic service to that of the arquebuses which had interrupted the Lutheran worship, he detailed a tissue of antitheses: “The bells ring, and the arquebuses thunder; those have a soft sound, and these a sound of fear; those open heaven, these open hell....” And thence this prelatical buffoon inferred that (Roman) Catholicism has all the signs of the true church. The Reformers published apologies, which they secretly scattered abroad, even in the king’s chamber. But they sought in vain for a serious inquiry. Their enemies did not by any means desire this; they judged it better to applaud the bands of wretches, who, crowding each day to the places appointed for capital punishments, shouted with bloodthirsty cries, “Death to the heretics!” Before the end of September, three prisoners were brought to the scaffold: an old man, a young one, and a woman, Madame de Graveron, of the family of Luns, in Périgord. She was only twenty-three years of age, and had been a widow but a few months. On quitting the prison for the scene of execution, she exchanged her mourning weeds, says Crespin, for the velvet hood and other festal garments, as if to receive a happy triumph.