Although after the Conference at Pamiers we hear no more of public debates on a grand scale, the preaching work of the mission was continued. Legate Raoul drops out of the story. The Bishop of Osma returned to his diocese to die, the sooner perhaps because of the hardships to which the old man had subjected himself, but left Dominic to go on with the work. Arnaut Amalric was again called away for a time by business in Northern France, leaving Pierre de Castelnau, and (apparently) Dominic, as the dominant personalities of the Papal mission. During 1207, the year of the conferences of Montreal and Pamiers, the earlier idea of putting pressure upon the secular authorities was by no means given up. It is quite possible, as Luchaire suggests, that men of the stamp of de Castelnau, Arnaut Amalric, and Fulk, continued to believe all along in measures stiffer than mere persuasion. And in this belief, if they held it, time was to show them right enough. De Castelnau crossed the Rhône into Raymond’s “Marquisate of Provence,” and persuaded the nobles there to associate themselves in a league which he organized for the prevention of feuds between its members. He further arranged to include in the objects of the league the prosecution of heretics and then summoned Raymond himself to join the association formed for two such worthy purposes by this good-sized group of his vassals. Raymond refused. Besides being utterly unwilling to prosecute heresy, he probably felt that his prestige would suffer if he did so as a late comer into an association of his own liegemen which he had not himself helped to organize. De Castelnau’s next move shows the gathering exasperation of years of failure. He excommunicated the Count. He interdicted his lands. Not content with that, he went boldly into his presence and denounced him publicly, to his face. No doubt he threw in his teeth the two promises which he had already broken, first that of 1199 to the Pope in the matter of the monks of St. Gilles, and second that to de Castelnau himself in 1205, two years before the denunciation when he had sworn to dismiss his mercenary troops and to prosecute heretics. The spectacle must have been dramatic; the monk, remember, had especially drawn upon himself the hatred of the heretics and the easy-going Catholics (who between them made up nearly all Languedoc), standing up barefoot in his grey Cistercian habit and cursing to his face the greatest lord of the south. For protection he had nothing but such moral authority as the Church still possessed in the face of the heresy all about. His worst enemy could not have denied de Castelnau’s courage. Innocent lost no time in confirming the sentence. He ordered the Archbishops of Vienne, Embrun, Arles, and Narbonne to publish and to enforce it. He did more; he wrote directly, and fiercely, to Raymond himself.