to Meaux from villages five or six leagues distant. [Sidenote: A woman's pointed remark.] [Sidenote: A favorite psalm.] Betrayed by their size, the conventicles came to the knowledge of the magistrates, and on the eighth of September, 1546, a descent was made upon the worshipping Christians. Sixty-two persons composed the gathering. The lieutenant and provost of the city, with their meagre suite, could easily have been set at defiance. But the announcement of arrest in the king's name prevented any attempt either at resistance on their part, or at rescue on that of their friends. Respecting the authority of law, the Protestants allowed themselves to be bound and led away by an insignificant detachment of officers. Only the pointed remark of one young woman to the lieutenant, as she was bound, has come down to us: "Sir, had you found me in a brothel, as you now find me in so holy and honorable a company, you would not have used me thus." As the prisoners passed through the streets of Meaux, their friends neither interfered with the ministers of justice, nor exhibited solicitude for their own safety; but accompanying them, as in a triumphal procession, loudly gave expression to their trust in God, by raising one of their favorite psalms, in Clement Marot's translation:[510] Les gens entrez sont en ton heritage: Ils ont pollu, Seigneur, par leur outrage, Ton temple sainct, Jerusalem destruite, Si qu'en monceaux de pierres, l'on reduite. It was neither the first time, nor was it destined to be by any means the last, that those rugged, but nervous lines thrilled the souls of the persecuted Huguenots of France as with the sound of a trumpet, and braced them to the patient endurance of suffering or to the performance of deeds of valor. [Sidenote: The "Fourteen of Meaux."] Dragged with excessive and unnecessary violence to Paris, the prisoners were put on trial, and, within a single month, sentence was passed on them. The crime of having celebrated the Lord's Supper was almost inexpiable. Fourteen men, with Leclerc their minister, and Étienne Mangin, in whose house their worship had been held, were condemned to torture and the stake; others to whipping and banishment; the remainder, both men and women, to public penance and attendance upon the execution of their more prominent brethren. Upon one young man, whose tender years alone saved him from the flames, a sentence of a somewhat whimsical character was pronounced. He was to be suspended under the arms during the auto-da-fé of his brethren, and, with a halter around his neck, was from his elevated position to witness their agony, as an instructive warning of the dangerous consequence of persistence in heretical errors. Mangin's house was to be razed, and on the site a chapel of the Virgin erected, wherein a solemn weekly mass was to be celebrated in honor of the sacramental wafer, the expense being defrayed by the confiscated property of the Protestants.