The inhabitants of the castles had disappeared: fear of the Bernese had depopulated the country. Men, women, and children had taken refuge in the miserable chalets of the Salève, Voirons, Mole, and Jura. Priests and monks, hurriedly abandoning their parishes and their convents, threw off their frocks and assumed the garb of the peasantry. 'Not one man in all the country dared represent himself as a priest or a monk.' Every now and then one of them dressed in a coarse gray coat would leave his hiding-place, and mysteriously entering some half-deserted hut, would ask the affrighted peasant 'what the bear of Berne was doing.' 'But take care,' he added, 'you tell nobody that I am a priest.' The clerical and lay despots of the Middle Ages learnt in their turn what it was to tremble. At length a great spectacle of desolation, which was to be the last, began. A judgment—may we not call it a judgment of God?—was accomplished. Here and there at first a few flames were seen flashing forth, and these soon became an immense conflagration. Detachments, consisting of Bernese and Genevans, issued from the city: some turned to the right, others to the left; the ancient walls of some old towers were their aim. 'It was from thence,' said the Genevans, 'that rapine and death have so often rushed out upon us.' The building was surrounded, the most impetuous made their way into the interior and set fire to it, and when the flames had caught they rushed off for another execution. These detachments were followed by a numerous troop of men, women, and boys, who had their share also in the business. The judgment of God swept over the country, as of old over the land of Canaan. The fortresses of Gex, Gaillard, and Jussy, those terrible scourges of Geneva; the castles of Coppet, Prangins, Bellerive, Vilette, Ville-la-Grand, and many others, fell a prey to the flames. They were in all, according to Froment, from a hundred to a hundred and forty. Geneva was sometimes surrounded by a circle of fire. The longer and crueller the offence, the more terrible was the punishment. No one was put to death, but those feudal lairs, which crumbled away in the midst of the flames, were a sacrifice offered by the Swiss to the shades of the citizens immolated by their former possessors. [Sidenote: DESTRUCTION OF PENEY.]