[Sidenote: CONFUSION.] The confusion that prevailed in Geneva at this period is attested by contemporaries. ‘Popery had indeed been forsworn,’ says Theodore Beza,[612] ‘but many had not cast away with it those numerous and disgraceful disorders which had for a long time flourished in the city, given up as it was for so many years to canons and impure priests. Some of the families which stood in the highest rank still kept alive those old enmities which grew up at the period of the wars with Savoy.’[613] ‘The mischief had gone to such a length that the city, owing to the factious temper of some of the citizens, was divided into various parties.’[614] ‘Nothing was to be heard,’ says Michel Rozet, ‘but informations (_dénonces_) and quarrels between the former and the present lords (the former and the new councils), some being the ringleaders, others following in their steps; the whole mingled with reproaches about the booty taken in the war, or the spoils carried off from the churches.’[615] ‘There was nothing but confusion.’[616] Neither the mild admonitions which were at first tried, nor the more rigorous reprimands to which recourse was afterwards had, produced any effect on the disturbers of the peace, and they failed to put an end to their disorderly proceedings.[617] ‘I have lived here,’ says Calvin himself, when speaking of this period, ‘engaged in strange contests. I have been saluted in mockery, of an evening, before my own door, with fifty or sixty shots of arquebuses. You may imagine how that must astound a poor scholar, timid as I am, and as I confess I always was.’[618] Such was the melancholy condition of Geneva according to men who, on questions of fact and of public fact, are the most respectable authorities that history can produce. She has but few witnesses endowed with the moral courage of Michel Rozet, Theodore Beza, and Calvin.[619] [Sidenote: PERPLEXITY OF THE REFORMERS.]