Favorite game is still found in the clergy, more vigorously hunted than the nobles; Roland, charged with the duty of maintaining public order, asks himself how the lives of inoffensive priests, which the law recommends to him, can be protected.--At Troyes, at the house of M. Fardeau, an old non-conformist curé, an altar decked with its sacred vessels is discovered, and M. Fardeau, arrested, refuses to take the civic oath. Torn from his prison, and ordered to shout "Vive la Nation!" he again refuses. On this, a volunteer, borrowing an ax from a baker, chops off his head, and this head, washed in the river, is borne to the Hôtel-de-ville.[3278]--At Meaux, a brigade of Parisian gendarmerie murders seven priests, and, as an extra, six ordinary malefactors in confinement.[3279] At Rheims, the Parisian volunteers first make way with the post-master and his clerk, both under suspicion because the smell of burnt paper had issued from their chimney, and, next, M. de Montrosier, an old retired officer, which is the opening of the hunt. Afterwards they fall upon two ecclesiastics with pikes and sabers, whom their game-beaters have brought in from the country, then on the former curé of Saint-Jean, and on that of Rilly; their corpses are cut up, paraded through the streets in portions, and burnt in a bonfire; one of the wounded priests, the abbé Alexandre, is thrown in still alive.[3280]--Roland recognizes the men of September, who, exposing their still bloody pikes, came to his domicile to demand their wages; wherever the band passes it announces, "in the name of the people," its "plenary power to spread the example of the capital." Now, as 40,000 unsworn priests are condemned by the decree of August 26 to leave their departments in a week and France in a fortnight, shall they be allowed to depart? Eight thousand of them at Rouen, in obedience to the decree, charter transports, which the riotous population of both sides of the Seine prevent from leaving. Roland sees in his dispatches that in Rouen, as elsewhere, they crowd the municipalities for their passports,[3281] but that these are often refused. Better still, at Troyes; at Meaux, at Lyons, at Dôle, and in many other towns, the same thing is done as at Paris; they are confined in particular houses or in prisons, at least, provisionally, "for fear that they may congregate under the German eagle"; so that, made rebellious and declared traitors in spite of themselves, they may still remain in their pens subject to the knife. As the exportation of specie is prohibited, those who have procured the necessary coin are robbed of it on the frontier, while others, who fly at all hazards, tracked like wild boars, or run down like hares, escape like the bishop of Barral, athwart bayonets, or like the abbé Guillon, athwart sabers, when they are not struck down, like the abbé Pescheur, by the blows of a gun-stock.[3282]