It would be asserting too much to say that the Protestants were innocent of any infraction upon the letter or spirit of the Edict of Amboise. They would have been angels, not men, had they been proof against the contagious spirit of raillery that infected the men of the sixteenth century. Where they dared, they not unfrequently held up their opponents to ridicule in the coarse style so popular with all classes.[415] Thus a contemporary Roman Catholic recounts with indignation how Prince Porcien held a celebration in Normandy, and among the games was one in which a "paper castle" was assaulted, and the defenders, dressed as _monks_, were taken prisoners, and were afterward paraded through the streets on asses' backs.[416] But these buffooneries were harmless sallies contrasted with the insults with which the Protestants were treated in every town where they were not numerically preponderating; nor were they anything more than rare occurrences in comparison with the latter. This page of history is compelled to record no violent commotion on the part of the reformed population, save in cases where, as at Pamiers (a town not far south of Toulouse, near the foot of the Pyrenees), they had been goaded to madness by the government deliberately trampling upon their rights of worship, at the instigation of the ecclesiastical authorities.[417] A trifling accident might then, however, be sufficient to cause their inflamed passions to burst out; and in the disturbances that were likely to ensue, little respect was usually paid to the churches or the monasteries. Such are wont to be the unhappy effects of the denial of justice according to the forms of established law. They would have been a hundred-fold more frequent had it not been for the persistent opposition interposed by the Huguenot ministers--many of them with Calvin carrying the doctrine of passive submission to constituted authority almost to the very verge of apparent pusillanimity. [Sidenote: Alarm of the Protestants.] [Sidenote: Attempts to murder the admiral and Prince Porcien.]