While the mamelukes were indulging in highway robbery without the city, the weaker members of the episcopal party who still remained within it were living in fear. Their persons, their worship, their convents were respected: not a hair of their heads was touched; but they trembled lest the outrages of the refugees at Peney should excite the huguenots to take their revenge. The nuns especially were in perpetual alarm. One night, between eleven and twelve o’clock, the sisters of St. Claire were startled from their slumbers by a loud knocking at the door: scared at the noise, they listened with beating hearts. Then other knocks were heard. Faint and trembling, they crept from their beds. The huguenots are surely coming to avenge on them the perfidious night of the 31st of July! ‘The heretics,’ they whispered one to another, ‘have broken down the gates of the convent.’ The nuns ascribing guilty intentions to them, ran to the abbess in dismay: ‘My dear children,’ said she, ‘fight valiantly for the love of God.’ They waited, but nobody came. The youngest of the nuns, who had been at service overnight with the rest of the community, and made drowsy by the long prayers, had fallen into a sound sleep; the under-superior had locked her in the church without observing her. About eleven o’clock the unlucky sister awoke: she looked round, and could not make out where she was.... At last she recognized the chapel; but the darkness, the loneliness, the place itself—all combined to frighten her. She fancied she could see the dead taking advantage of that silent hour to quit their graves and wander through the church.... Her limbs refused to move. At length she summoned up courage and rushed to the door. It was locked. In her fright, she gave it a violent blow. It was this which woke the sisters. Then she listened, and as no one came, she knocked again three times, as loud as she could. While this was going on, the abbess prepared to receive the wolves who were about to devour her innocent lambs. She first desired to know if all her flock were present, and to her great anguish discovered that one was missing. Then another knock, louder than all the rest, was heard. ‘Let us go forth,’ said the abbess, ‘and enter the church, for it will be better for us to be before God than in the dormitory.’ They descended the stairs; the abbess put the key into the lock, opened the door ... and found before her the young nun, who, pale as death fainted away at her feet.[615] The tales that men took pleasure in circulating, and sometimes even printing, about the reformers and the reformed, about Calvin and Luther in particular, often had no more reality than the imaginations of the nuns of St. Claire as to the designs of the huguenots, which had given the poor girls such a terrible fright; and they were less innocent. Footnote 591: Registre du Conseil du 2 Juin, 1534.—La sœur Jeanne, _Levain du Calvinisme_, pp. 89, 90. Footnote 592: