The massacre of Sens took place in April, while the Baron de la Garde was on his mission of peace in the Protestant camp. It was said to have been perpetrated at the instigation of the Cardinal of Lorraine, who was archbishop of that city, and who took no steps to prevent the murders. As soon as the news reached the ears of Condé, he broke off all negotiations, and declared that he would not lay down his arms “until he had driven his most cruel enemies (the Guises) out of France.” The nuncio Santa Croce seems to allude to two massacres: “Since the massacre at Sens, of which I wrote in my last, another great slaughter of eighty Huguenots has happened, and some thirty of their houses have been burned in that city.” Perrenot de Chantonnay, the Spanish embassador, writes exultingly: “Already in many parts of this kingdom, as at Sens, Toulouse, Castel-Navarre, and Villefranche, the Catholics have risen against the Huguenots, who have had the worst of it; and in some places the preachers were burned in the market-place.” All over France, from the Channel to the Mediterranean, similar ferocious outbreaks occurred. At Sisteron, beneath the shadow of the Lower Alps, three hundred women and children, refugees from all parts of Provence, were pitilessly murdered, the men having made their escape. One poor woman with a baby in her arms was taken outside the town and put to death, and her body buried beneath the ruins of the house where she used to worship. All comment on these things[290] would be superfluous. Is it wonderful that in such a state of lawlessness the Reformed nobles and gentlemen armed in self-defense? With indignant eloquence, Agrippa d’Aubigné vindicates the rebellion in which the Huguenots sought to protect themselves: “So long as the adherents of the new religion were destroyed merely under the form of law, they submitted themselves to the slaughter, and never raised a hand in their own defense against those injuries, cruel and iniquitous as they were. But when the public authorities and the magistracy, divesting themselves of the venerable aspect of justice, put daggers into the hands of the people, abandoning every man to the violence of his neighbors; and when public massacres were perpetrated to the sound of the drum and of the trumpet, who could forbid the unhappy sufferers to oppose hand to hand, and sword to sword, and to catch the contagion of a righteous fury from a fury unrestrained by any sense of justice?”