From Meaux, Leclerc, forced to leave his home, retired first to Rosoy, and thence to Metz.[186] Here, while supporting himself by working at his humble trade, he lost none of his missionary spirit. Not content with communicating a knowledge of the doctrines of the Reformation to all with whom he conversed, his impatient zeal led him to a new and startling protest against the prevalent, and, in his view, idolatrous worship of images. Learning that on a certain day a solemn procession was to be made to a shrine situated a few miles out of the city gates, he went to the spot under cover of night, and hurled the sacred images from their places. On the morrow the horrified worshippers found the objects of their devotion prostrated and mutilated, and their rage knew no bounds. It was not long before the wool-carder was apprehended. His religious sentiments were no secret, and he had been seen returning from the scene of his nocturnal exploit. He promptly acknowledged his guilt, and was rescued from the infuriated populace only to undergo a more terrible doom at the hands of the public executioner (July 22, 1525). His right hand was cut off at the wrist, his arms, his nose, his breast were cruelly torn with pincers; but no cry of anguish escaped the lips of Leclerc. The sentence provided still further that, before his body should be consigned to the flames, his head be encircled with a red-hot band of iron. As the fervent metal slowly ate its way toward his very brain, the bystanders with amazement heard the dying man calmly repeat the words of Holy Writ: "Their idols are silver and gold, the work of men's hands." He had not completed the Psalmist's terrific denunciation of the crime and folly of image-worship when his voice was stifled by the fire and smoke of the pyre into which his impatient tormentors had hastily thrown him. If not actually the first martyr of the French Reformation, as has commonly been supposed, Jean Leclerc deserves, at least, to rank among the most constant and unswerving of its early apostles.[187] [Sidenote: Jacques Pauvan.]