The French churches had often resounded with furious declamations; and they afterwards rang with canticles of unholy joy. But the French clergy does not figure prominently in the inception or the execution of the sanguinary decree. Conti, a contemporary indeed, but too distant for accurate knowledge, relates that the parish priest went round, marking with a white cross the dwellings of the people who were doomed.[99] He is contradicted by the municipal Registers of Paris.[100] Morvilliers, Bishop of Orleans, though he had resigned the seals which he received from L'Hopital, still occupied the first place at the royal council. He was consulted at the last moment, and it is said that he nearly fainted with horror. He recovered, and gave his opinion with the rest. He is the only French prelate, except the cardinals, whose complicity appears to be ascertained. But at Orleans, where the bloodshed was more dreadful in proportion than at Paris, the signal is said to have been given, not by the bishop, but by the King's preacher, Sorbin. Sorbin is the only priest of the capital who is distinctly associated with the act of the Government. It was his opinion that God has ordained that no mercy shall be shown to heretics, that Charles was bound in conscience to do what he did, and that leniency would have been as censurable in his case as precipitation was in that of Theodosius. What the Calvinists called perfidy and cruelty seemed to him nothing but generosity and kindness.[101] These were the sentiments of the man from whose hands Charles IX. received the last consolations of his religion. It has been related that he was tortured in his last moments with remorse for the blood he had shed. His spiritual adviser was fitted to dispel such scruples. He tells us that he heard the last confession of the dying King, and that his most grievous sorrow was that he left the work unfinished.[102] In all that bloodstained history there is nothing more tragic than the scene in which the last words preparing the soul for judgment were spoken by such a confessor as Sorbin to such a penitent as Charles. Edmond Auger, one of the most able and eloquent of the Jesuits, was at that time attracting multitudes by his sermons at Bordeaux. He denounced with so much violence the heretics and the people in authority who protected them, that the magistrates, fearing a cry for blood, proposed to silence or to moderate the preacher. Montpezat, Lieutenant of Guienne, arrived in time to prevent it. On the 30th of September he wrote to the King that he had done this, and that there were a score of the inhabitants who might be despatched with advantage. Three days later, when he was gone, more than two hundred Huguenots were murdered.[103] Apart from these two instances it is not known that the clergy interfered in any part of France to encourage the assassins.