The Huguenots had lost much valuable time by this attempted mediation; while the clergy and Parliament of Paris, improving the opportunity, issued an order for those of the true Church to take up arms and kill the heretics like mad dogs. A contemporary denounces this proclamation as “a means to arm thieves, vagabonds, and villains. It made the ploughman to leave the plough, and the craftsman to shut up his shop; it changed the multitude into tigers and lions, and fleshed them against their own countrymen.”[297] Woe to the vanquished, for atrocity begets atrocity! A manuscript journal of this year, kept by some person attached to the court, describes the fearful state of Paris. Every day had its tale of outrage and murder by sword, rope, or water. Houses were pillaged and razed to the ground; cemeteries were broken open, and the relics of the dead scattered to the winds. The voice of the law was silent, and the government looked on, as if powerless to prevent, but in reality pleased to see their enemies exterminated. On one occasion, a child, hardly six months old, who had been christened by a Huguenot pastor, was rechristened at the Church of St. Germain l’Auxerrois. More than 10,000 spectators were witnesses of the ceremony: the bells rang out joyous peals from every steeple, and the crowd shouted: “Praised be God for the recovery of the poor little soul.” These profanations of the holy rite of baptism were not confined to Paris. At Le Puy the infant of “an apostate” was christened with great pomp of minstrels, arquebusiers, and “taborins,” the lord-bishop of the city being godfather.[298] On the last day of June several persons were murdered, and among them a woman accused of not going to mass for ten years. She was cruelly beaten and then flung into the Seine, when the boatmen knocked her on the head with oars and poles. Two men also were killed and thrown into the river, charged with being Huguenots. The blood-stained doublet of one of them was fastened to a stick and carried in procession through the streets of Paris by a troop of noisy children. “This, or something of the sort, was done every day,” says the court chronicler, “so that no one could be punished.”[299] The blood-thirstiness of the multitude spread even to the young. Santa Croce writes to Cardinal Borromeo: “Monsieur d’Enghien, who is only a little boy of seven, is always saying that we must no longer delay to burn all the Huguenots without mercy.... This I learned from the constable, who expressed how greatly he was pleased to hear it.”