Could such generous zeal save the city from the attacks of Savoy supported by France, Friburg, Burgundy, and the mamelukes? There were men who shook their heads with sorrow and ‘lived in fear and despondency.’ But ‘a friend sticketh closer than a brother.’ On the morning after the enterprise, a delegate from Lausanne arrived in Geneva, and although the Duke had given orders that the Estates of Vaud should make common cause with him, the messenger said: ‘We are ready, brethren, to send you a hundred arquebusiers if you want them.’ Neuchâtel made a similar offer. Berne commissioned Francis Nägeli the treasurer, the banneret Weingarten, and two other citizens, to exhort the Duke and Marshal of Burgundy to desist from hostilities. The Swiss cantons, assembled at Baden, forwarded a similar message to Charles III. The partisans of the pope and of the bishop saw that as their enterprise had miscarried, their cause was lost. The leaders had escaped at first: now the flight became general. Even the friends of the Genevese franchises began to leave the city; it was, therefore, natural that the fanatics should depart to swell the ranks of the mamelukes. They took with them all they could carry, and used various stratagems to get out of the city, stealing away cautiously by night. Some took refuge on the left shore of the lake; a greater number in the castle of Peney, on the right bank of the Rhone, whence they kept the Genevese population continually on the alert. Their wives and children, left behind in the city, held secret interviews with them at the foot of the steep cliffs which line the banks of the river, and told them all the news. No Genevan citizen could start for Lyons without the refugees at Peney being informed of it; they were always on the look-out for travellers. It was a strange phenomenon, of which history presents, however, more than one example, this opposition of the papists and feudalists to civil and religious liberty degenerating into brigandage.[613] The flight of the episcopalian laity destroyed the power of the clergy, whose support they were, and made the reformers masters of the situation. Geneva was resolved to keep within her walls none but those who were ready to shed their blood for her. One night when the drum called citizens to arms a timid man bade his wife say he was absent: some of his neighbors, however, forced their way into his chamber and found him hidden in bed, pretending to have the fever: he shook, indeed, but it was with fear. The coward was banished from the city for life, under pain of being flogged if he returned: a year later, however, he was indulgently readmitted, ‘because it is not given to every man to have the courage of a Cæsar,’ says the ‘Register’; but he was always looked upon as an alien. Courage was at that time one of the qualifications necessary for Genevese citizenship.[614] [Sidenote: Frightened Nuns.]