for the duke wished to avert all opposition. Having read the paper, the chancellor stepped forward, and cried as loud as he could, for his voice was weak: ‘Are you willing to live in obedience to your bishop and prince, and under the protection of my lord duke?’ ... The question should now have been put to the vote; but the impatient mamelukes carried it by acclamation, shouting out with all their might: ‘Yes, yes!’ The chancellor resumed: ‘My lord, seeing the great love this city feels towards him, cancels all the penalties it has incurred, takes off all sequestrations, remits all fines, which amount to twenty-two thousand crowns, and pardons all rebels--those excepted who have fled to Switzerland.’ Such are usually the amnesties of tyrants; those are excepted who ought to be included, and those included who do not need it. ‘Thanks, thanks!’ replied the mamelukes. ‘As my chancellor may not have been distinctly heard,’ said Charles to Syndic Montyon, ‘have the goodness to repeat what he has said in my name.’ After this, his Highness, with his chancellor, courtiers, gentlemen, and halberdiers, left the assembly and went to mass. It looked like a triumphal procession. As for those left behind, if there were venal citizens who dared to raise their heads, there were others whose uneasy consciences bowed them down.[385] As soon as the Genevese were left to themselves, Montyon, a fanatical partisan of Savoy, got on a bench and repeated, not without embarrassment, the chancellor’s address. The halberdiers being away, the assent was no longer unanimous. There were still many honest men in Geneva who clung to the ancient institutions of the State and held a Savoyard usurpation in horror. Some, at the very moment when the liberty of their country was about to be thrown into the abyss, were smitten with a last love for her. ‘The address is full of guile,’ they said. Many, however, acceded to the ‘protection,’ but added, ‘saving the authority of the prince-bishop and the liberties of the city,’ which nullified the vote.[386] Such was the _Council of Halberds_. It had given Geneva the Duke of Savoy for her _protector_, and had imposed on the citizens _obedience_ towards that prince. An encroaching, powerful, able court, like that of Turin, could easily make an hereditary sovereignty out of such a concession. But a course of violence and stratagem provokes the resistance of noble minds. After the action of despotism, the reaction of liberty was to begin; the bow too violently bent by the duke was to break in his hand.