The third brother, Odet de Châtillon, was the eldest of the family. Made by Clement VII. a cardinal at seventeen, he demanded reforms without completely adopting the Reformation. He ended by marrying a lady of a noble house, Isabelle de Hauteville, who was styled _Madame la Cardinal_, or _Madame la Comtesse de Beauvais_, when she took her seat in the apartments of the court in the quality of wife of a peer of France: a curious singularity, even in that time! Odet de Châtillon died in England some years after, being poisoned by one of his servants. Brantôme and De Thou speak in high terms of his judgment and integrity. XI. Catherine de Medicis had expressed in her days of disappointment some sentiments favourable to the Reformation, and those of the (new) religion supposed at first that she would lend them her support with her son Francis II. Coligny and other Calvinist lords wrote to her that they hoped to find in her a second Esther. But her favourable disposition was only apparent. “I comprehend nothing of this doctrine,” she would say; “what enlisted my sympathy for them, was rather my woman’s pity and compassion than a desire to be informed if their doctrine were true or false.” In concert with the queen-mother and the court of Madrid, the Guises held the Bourbons in the background, and sent forth new edicts for exterminating heretics. In each Parliament _chambres ardentes_ were instituted, so called because they condemned to the fire without pity, all those who were accused of the crime of heresy. There was a vast system of terror, where even the shadow of justice no longer appeared. Delations, confiscations, pillages, sentences of death, atrocious executions—the same scenes affrighted in the beginning of 1560, the principal towns of France,—Toulouse, Bordeaux, Lyons, Grenoble, Poitiers, and their dependent provinces. At Paris, the commissaries of the quarters made daily visits to the suspected houses. One Démochères, or Mouchy, who has given the French language the term of _mouchard_ (spy), took the field with a band of wretches, whose object was to surprise the heretics eating meat on the prohibited days, or assembling in meetings. They kept particular watch on the Faubourg Saint Germain, which at that time received the name of Little Geneva.