wonders of the world, which sixty years before had cost the large sum of ten thousand ducats. The plunder of the churches served to keep up the war. That of St. Martin at Tours furnished Condé with 1,200,000 livres, without counting the jewels in the shrines.[310] When the king’s authority was restored in Tours, mass was ordered to be sung in St. Martin’s Church, but every thing in it had been broken or destroyed, except the stalls in the choir and a few of the painted windows. This was on the 13th June, and on the 14th and 15th of the following month the massacre occurred. The interval is sufficient to show that it was caused by something more than the usual military license of those rough days. We shall find a horrible sameness in these stories: men and women, young and old, were murdered indiscriminately; even children were not spared. Boats filled with victims were sunk in the river; thus anticipating, by more than two centuries, the _noyades_ of the infamous Carrier. Three hundred persons were shut up in a church, and after being kept there for three days without food, were bound two and two and taken to the _escorcherie_ (the knacker’s yard) and there killed. “Little children (whose parents had been murdered) could be bought for a crown apiece,” adds D’Aubigné. In five or six days the banks of the river down to Angers were covered with dead bodies, “dont les bestes mêmes s’espouvantoyent,” says Crespin, “at which even the wild beasts were horror-stricken.” After order had been restored by the Duke of Montpensier, a minister was hanged for preaching a sermon not to the taste of his hearers. Because the fronts of certain houses had not been decorated with hangings during the procession of Corpus Christi, some of the inhabitants were drowned, others imprisoned, and in every case the houses were thoroughly gutted. Two women were dragged to the river and flung into water so shallow, that they could not drown, whereupon they were beaten to death with oars and poles. Jean Bourgeau, president of the city, was caught while attempting to escape in a boat (30th Nov., 1562). He was first drowned and then hanged to a tree and disemboweled, “because not only had he been averse to punishing the heretics, but had moreover favored them by adhering to their erroneous opinions and oppressing the Catholics.”[311]