A very extraordinary thing occurred at this moment. Nobody was willing to begin the work and yet it was accomplished. 'God,' said the reformers, 'who holds the world in his hand, loves to choose the contemptible rather than what is great and apparent.' In fact, it was a mischievous jest of some children which dealt the first blow. 'For this work,' says Froment, 'God stirred up a score of little boys.' These children had often heard the priests, and their errors and abuses spoken of; and their parents had added that it was time they were ended. They slipped into St. Pierre's; stopped and listened, and were struck with the strange intonations of the canons. Making their way towards a part of the church remote from that in which the reverend fathers were chanting, they began to play like boys of their age, 'while nobody thought anything about it,' says the chronicler. They commenced singing and shouting in imitation of the canons' voices. Presently they lifted up the seats of the low stalls, on which the reverend fathers used to sit when they were not engaged in the service, and let them fall with a noise. Everybody knows the fondness little boys have for amusements of this kind. They gambolled about, but in their games there was a certain opposition to the worship which their fathers condemned. The petulance of their age carried them away. They saw in a corner certain things that resembled dolls; they could not resist their desire to take them; and catching hold of the 'priests' mannikins,'[566] as Froment calls them, they began to toss to one another the small grotesque figures with which the chapels were decorated. [Sidenote: THE IMAGES BROKEN.]