There is a bit of evidence tending to prove that, in St. Dominic, the discouragement of his fellow missioners was translated into anger. To his congregation at Prouille he is said to have told of his years of preaching, prayer and tears, in their behalf, then to have quoted a Spanish proverb: “Use the stick where a blessing will not serve!” “So,” said he calling up before them visions of war and massacre, “force shall prevail where sweetness has failed.” If this sermon of St. Dominic’s was, in fact, preached towards the end of the year 1207, it coincided in time with a new and particularly solemn and pressing series of letters addressed by Innocent not only to Philip Augustus but also to that king’s chief vassals the Duke of Burgundy and the Counts of Bar, Dreux, Nevers, Champagne, and Blois. The Pope recalled to the “French” princes (i.e., North-French as we should say) the nine years already spent in the hopeless effort to convert the southern heretics by means of gentleness. Now, said he, the miseries of war must bring them to truth. Those who took the Cross were to receive full and complete remission of their sins as if their crusading had been to Palestine itself. As the lands of heretics were to be their lawful prey, so their own lands and families were under special protection of the Pope. No creditors could collect interest from a Crusader during his absence, and crusading clergy were authorized to mortgage their revenues for two years in advance. Really it seems as if the Pope could hardly have bid higher. By this time he must have been convinced, not only that the Albigenses must be put down by force, but also that the task was equal in importance to recovering the Holy Land itself. Better a lion in the desert than a wild cat in the bed chamber, as Scott makes Saladin remark to Richard Cœur de Lion. Innocent would almost certainly have maintained that the Saracenic lion was a fair fighter, whereas the teeth and claws of the Albigensian wild-cat bore poison.