The favor shown to the Huguenots greatly annoyed the orthodox party. Old Montmorency was greatly scandalized that Condé, Coligny, and others ate meat in Lent; and that Archbishop Montluc, brother of the brutal soldier of that name, openly preached that it was not wrong to pray to God in French, and that the Scriptures ought to be translated into the vulgar tongue. The halls of St. Germain’s and Fontainebleau were thrown open to Huguenot ministers, and “it seemed as if the whole court had become Calvinist,” says the Jesuit Maimbourg. Catherine received the Protestant leaders with favor, and assumed the character of a devout inquirer after truth.[230] Chantonnay, the Spanish embassador, scarcely wrote a letter to his royal master in which he did not complain of the toleration shown to heretics,[231] and of the influence of the admiral, whose chaplain often preached to a congregation of more than 300 persons. Another time he writes: “The day after Easter Sunday the public preachings in the great court of Fontainebleau, before the lodgings of Admiral Coligny, in the presence of M. de Condé, have been forbidden.” On the 9th July he says that not a day passes without preaching “in the mansion of some lord or lady of the court.” The same busy correspondent informs us that in August, 1561, Beza preached in the hotel of the Prince of Condé at St. Germains and in the royal palace, and that the Reformed ministers “were more confident than the Catholic.” At another time we read that, in consequence of the favor shown to the heretics, there had occurred every day at Paris and elsewhere, “seditions, tumults, and murders of Protestants and Catholics.”[232] A little later Chantonnay mentions that certain bishops, adopting the doctrine and language of the heretics, called for reform in the Church; and that the clergy were made a laughing-stock in the presence even of the papal legate. “After supper the other evening, when the cardinal-legate was with the queen, the king, his brother the Duke of Orleans, and the Prince of Bearn, entered the room, followed by many others, all of them dressed up as cardinals, bishops, abbots, and priests, riding upon asses, and each carrying on the crupper behind him a page dressed as a loose woman.[233] There was a good laugh at it, and they continue to amuse themselves, calling the Prince of Bearn legate, because he was dressed as a cardinal.” The nuncio complained of this masque, for which Catherine apologized as being “only a childish jest.” Margaret of Valois, afterward wife of Henry IV., writes in her memoirs that “all the court was infected with heresy,” that “many of the lords and ladies tried to convert her,” that “her brother of Anjou [afterward Henry III.] had not escaped the unhappy influence, and that he used to throw her prayer-book into the fire and give her Huguenot hymns instead.” Considering that Margaret was at this time barely eight years old, her testimony, given nearly forty years later, is