At these words, which reminded him of his sister's fate, the butcher, instead of breaking forth anew with violent imprecations, covered his face in both his hands and began to weep. The sight of this rough and rude man's tender sorrow produced a deep impression upon the crowd. The frightful ferment of a revengeful, inexorable and blind hatred caused even the coldest hearts to boil with indignation. The goldsmith finished his letter amid a mass of humanity that was panting for revenge, and impatient to slake its ire upon the partisans of the French: "Greed, besides cruelty, animated both the French captain and his soldiers. They hanged men by the feet in the chimneys of their own houses, and lighted a fire under them in order that, suffocated and singed by the clouds of smoke that rose upward and the flames that licked their faces, they be driven to disclose where they had hidden their money and valuables. Often the victims possessed none of these, and they perished, the prey to barbarous greed. Other soldiers stripped the last shred of clothing from the women and girls whom they outraged, and drove them naked into the fields where they were left to die of hunger and cold. One officer (in justice to him be it said) finding two young ladies of the upper class in this condition, took pity upon them, gave them his cloak and some linen that he had with him, and, before returning to his post, recommended the unfortunate girls to the care of another officer. The latter, however, violated both the girls, and thereupon turned them over to his soldiers, who, after subjecting them to further and extreme outrage, mutilated them frightfully.[4] Their shapeless corpses were found day before yesterday near the dike that leads from Bodegrave to Woerden. "From Nymwegen I learn that one of those butchers, who do not deserve the name of soldiers, and who was wicked enough to cut off the breasts of a lying-in mother and to sprinkle gunpowder upon her wounds, died yesterday in the agonies of a frightful delirium, caused by remorse for his crime. He believed he saw the distracted woman pursuing him, and heard her cries of pain. A boatman, the brother of my father's tenant farmer, was nailed by both his hands to the mainmast of his barge, while, under the very eyes of the poor fellow, the soldiers indulged their depravity upon his daughter. Not even the dead are respected. Two funerals were stopped on the way to the graveyard, the corpses were stripped of their shrouds by the soldiers of Louis XIV, and then thrown into the canal."