With such associations as "the Confraternities of the Holy Ghost," and "the Christian and Royal League" springing up in various parts of France, under the express sanction of the provincial governors, and publishing as their chief aim the extirpation of heresy from the realm; with priests and monks, especially those of the new order of Jesus, inflaming the passions of the people by seditious preaching, and persuading their hearers that any toleration of heretics was a compact with Satan, it is not strange that murder held high carnival wherever the Protestants were not so numerous as to be able to stand on the defensive. The victims were of every rank and station, from the obscure peasant to the distinguished Cipierre, son of the Count de Tende and a relative of the Duke of Savoy, the orders for whose assassination were confidently believed to have issued from the court.[540] At Auxerre, which had been given up by the Huguenots in accordance with the provisions of the peace, one hundred and fifty Protestants paid with their lives the price of their good faith. Their bodies were thrown into the public sewers. In the city of Amiens one hundred and fifty persons were slaughtered at one time. Instead of punishment, the rioters obtained their object: the reformed worship was forbidden in Amiens, or within three leagues of the city.[541] At Clermont the assassins, after plundering the wares of a wealthy merchant, who had refused to hang tapestry before his house at the time of the procession on Corpus Christi Day--La Fete-Dieu--buried him in a fire made of furniture taken from his own house.[542] At Ligny, in Champagne, a Huguenot was pursued into the very bedchamber of a royal officer, and there killed. Troyes, Bourges, Rouen, and a host of other places, witnessed the commission of atrocities which it would be rather sickening than profitable to narrate.[543] In Paris itself the murders of Huguenots were frequent. "On Sunday last," wrote Norris, the English envoy, to his royal mistress, "the Prince of Conde sent a gentleman to the king, to beseech his Majesty to administer justice against such as murder them of the religion, and as he entered into the city there were five slain in St. Anthony's street, not far from my lodging."[544] The aggregate of homicides committed within the brief compass of this so-called peace was enormous. Jean de Serres and Agrippa d'Aubigne may possibly go somewhat beyond the mark when they state the number of victims in three months--April, May, and June, 1568--at over ten thousand;[545] but they are substantially correct in saying that the number far exceeded that of the armed Huguenots slain during the six months of the preceding war;[546] for the Venetian ambassador, who certainly had no motive for exaggeration, asserts that "the principal cities of the kingdom, notwithstanding the conditions of the peace, refused to readmit 'the preachings' to their