On the 26th October the breach was stormed. The fatigued and overmatched garrison made but a feeble resistance, and the city was won. Montgomery escaped, but those who remained had to suffer all the extremities of a town abandoned to the passions of an unscrupulous soldiery. The commanders had forbidden all pillage--for the besieged, though rebels, were still the king’s subjects--but the indiscipline of the army was too strong. The Swiss mercenaries obeyed the order, “but the French soldiers would sooner be killed than come away so long as there was any thing to take.” For three days the license endured, when the king, attended by his mother and the parliament, made his triumphal entry through the breach, and put an end to the outrages of the soldiery.[313] And now the hour of vengeance had come. The Catholics remembered how, one Sunday in May, the Huguenots, in the exultation of their triumph, had sacked and defaced the cathedral and thirty-six parish churches. “They made such work,” says Beza, “that they left neither altar nor image, font nor benitier.”[314] That this was not the act of a lawless mob, or of a sudden excitement, but of calmness and deliberation, is probable from what happened about the same time at Caen, in the same province, where the minister Cousin told the judges “that this idolatry had been put up with too long, and that it must be trampled down.” And here the destroyers, after scattering the ashes of William the Conqueror, breaking organs, pictures, pulpits, and statues, to the estimated value of 100,000 crowns, had the impudence to ask the town council to pay them for their two days’ work--which was done.[315] At Rouen, the anger of the Catholic soldiery was increased by the conduct of the Huguenot clergy, who had refused the honorable terms of surrender which had been offered them, declaring that Heaven would work a miracle, if all human means should fail, to prevent their falling into the hands of the Romanists. That miracle was not worked, and one of the first victims of this tampering with the Divine will was Marlorat, chief pastor of the city. He had been an Augustine monk, and, leaving his convent, escaped to Geneva, where he abjured Romanism. Apostate as he was in the eyes of the Catholics, he was permitted to appear at the conference of Poissy, where he acted as the Protestant leader until Beza arrived. Such an instance of toleration ought not to be overlooked.