Leaving the palace of Fontainebleau, the court passed through Sens and Troyes to the city of Bar-sur-Seine, where Charles acted as sponsor for his infant nephew, the son of the Duke of Lorraine. The brilliant _fetes_ that accompanied the arrival of the king here and elsewhere could not, however, hide from the world one of the chief results, if not designs, of the journey. It was a prominent part of the queen mother's plan to seize the opportunity for carrying out the system of repression toward the Huguenots which she had already begun. While there is no reason to suppose that as yet she felt any disposition to lend an ear to the suggestions of Spanish emissaries, or of Philip himself, for a general massacre, or at least an open war of extermination, she was certainly very willing by less open means to preclude the Protestants from ever giving her trouble, or becoming again a formidable power in the state. The most unfavorable reports, in truth, were in circulation against the Huguenots. At Lyons they were accused of poisoning the wells, or, according to another version of the story, the kitchen-pots, in order to give the impression that the plague was in the city, and so deter the king from coming.[340] Catharine had no need, however, of crediting these calumnious tales in order to be moved to hostile action. Her desire was unabated to reign under her son's name, untrammelled by the restraint of the jealous love of liberty cherished by the Huguenots. Their numbers were large--though not so large as they were then supposed to be. Even so intelligent a historian as Garnier regards them as constituting nearly one-third of the kingdom.[341] M. Lacretelle is undoubtedly much more correct in estimating them at fifteen or sixteen hundred thousand souls, or barely one-tenth of the entire population of France--a country at that time much more sparsely inhabited, and of which a much larger part of the surface was in inferior cultivation, or altogether neglected, than at present.[342] But, however small their number in proportion to the papists, the Huguenots, from their superior industry and intelligence, from the circumstance that their strength lay in the sturdy middle class and in the nobility, including little of the rabble of the cities and none of that of Paris,[343] were a party that naturally awakened the jealousy of the queen. We need make little account of any exasperation in consequence of such silly devices as the threatening letter said to have been put in Catharine's bed-room, warning her that if she did not drive the papists from about her, "she and her L'Aubespine" (secretary of state) would feel the dagger.[344] She was too shrewd not to know that a Roman Catholic was more likely to have penned it than a Huguenot. [Sidenote: Catharine's new zeal.]