On the 12th of July some huguenots appeared before the council. 'The priests of the Magdalen,' they said, 'keep an improper house, in which reside several disorderly women.' There were among the Genevans, and particularly among the magistrates, men of good sense, who had the fear of God before their eyes and confidence in him in their hearts. These respectable laymen (and there may have been priests who thought the same) had a deep conviction that one of the great defects of the middle ages was the existence of popes, bishops, priests, and monks, who had separated religion from morality. The council attended to these complaints to a certain extent. They banished from Geneva the persons who made it their business to facilitate illicit intercourse, obliged the lewd women to live in a place assigned them, and severely remonstrated with the priests.[743] The first breath of the Reformation in Geneva attacked immorality. It was not this affair, however, which gave the bishop his death-blow; it was a scandal occasioned by himself, and in his own house. 'Halting justice' was about to overtake the guilty man at last. [Sidenote: ABDUCTION OF A YOUNG WOMAN.] One day a report suddenly got abroad which put the whole city in commotion. 'A young girl, of respectable family,' said the crowd, 'has just been carried off by the bishop's people: we saw them dragging her to the palace.' It was an electric spark that set the whole populace on fire. The palace gates had been immediately closed upon the victim, and the bishop's servants threatened to repel with main force the persons who demanded her. 'Does the bishop imagine,' said some of the patriots, 'that we will put up with his beatings as quietly as the folks of St. Claude do?' It would seem that La Baume permitted such practices among the Burgundians, who did not complain of them. The girl's mother, rushing into the street, had followed her as fast as possible, and had only stopped at the closed gates of the episcopal palace. She paced round and round the building, roaring like a lioness deprived of her whelp. The citizens, crowding in front of the palace, exclaimed: 'Ha! you are now throwing off the mask of holiness which you held up to deceive the simple. In your churches you kiss God's feet, and in your life you daringly spit in his face!' Many of them called for the bishop, summoning him to restore the young woman to her mother, and hammering violently at the gate.