The duke had no sooner departed than there was a general burst of indignation against him, and against the mamelukes who had delivered up the greatest of the citizens to his sword. Bernard Boulet, the city treasurer, was one of the proudest of these ducal partisans. He had built a fine house, where he gave splendid entertainments to his party and kept a good table, by which means he soon squandered away all his property. But unwilling to renounce his gay life, he clandestinely appropriated the property of the State, and still continued to entertain magnificently. ‘Boulet,’ said the huguenots, ‘thinks only of indulging with his friends in all kinds of pleasure, in drunkenness, and in voluptuousness. Foppish in dress, dainty at table, he has no thought for the hunger and nakedness of the poor. Dissipation, bad management, fraud, robbery make up his whole life.’ Boulet, who furnished no accounts, owed the city ‘at least 6,400 florins’[355]--a very large sum for those days. But they feared his influence and malice; and nobody was willing ‘to bell the cat.’ Syndic Richardet, a good patriot, courageous but hot-headed, entered the council one day determined to put an end to these manifest peculations. ‘I call upon the treasurer,’ he said, ‘to produce the accounts of his office.’ The embarrassed Boulet attempted to evade the question; but, being determined to make him give an account of his conduct, the syndic persisted. The mameluke, driven into a corner, exclaimed: ‘Are we to be governed by these _huguenots_?’--‘He spoke thus from contempt,’ says Bonivard. The fiery Richardet could not restrain himself; exasperated because the treasurer insulted him at the very moment he was discharging the duties of his office, he acted after the style of Homer’s heroes, and, raising his syndic’s staff above the dishonest mameluke, dealt him such a blow that the staff flew to pieces. It must be remembered that in the middle ages deeds of violence were sometimes reckoned lawful. For instance, an old charter bore that if a respectable man or woman were insulted, every prud’homme who came up was permitted to punish such misconduct by one, two, or three blows; only the prud’homme was required to make oath afterwards that he had given the blows for the sake of peace.[356] There was instantly a great commotion in the hall; the mameluke councillors uttered cries of anger; the huguenots protested that Richardet had acted without their approval; and the syndic, who was sincere and good at heart, frankly apologised. Throughout all the disturbance Boulet did not utter a word; he was secretly calculating the advantages he could derive from this assault, and was delighted to have suffered it. ‘He swallowed it as mild as milk,’ says Bonivard.[357] Chance, he thought, favoured him, and had opportunely extricated him from a desperate position. What a providence in this violent act of the syndic! The greedy dishonest