people,” paying their _taille_ to the crown and the _droits_ to their lord more regularly than their orthodox neighbors. But their virtues were their chief crime in the eyes of the king’s clerical advisers. In 1540 the Parliament of Provence had condemned twenty-three of these poor creatures to be burned alive for contumacy, and ordered their country to be laid waste. The sanguinary decree farther directed the towns of Mérindol and Cabrières, and other places, which had been the refuge and retreat of the heretics, to be razed to the ground, the caves which had served them for an asylum to be destroyed, the forests cut down, the fruit-trees rooted up, the rebel chiefs put to death, and their wives and children banished for life.”[13] Some friends of the poor Vaudois succeeded in getting the decree suspended until 1st January, 1545; when Francis I., hoping to do a meritorious work that would atone for his dissolute life, ordered it to be enforced. To John Menier, baron of Oppède, and chief president of the Parliament of Provence, was entrusted the task of carrying out the royal decree. He was one of those happily rare individuals who delight in slaughter from mere blood-thirstiness. He made no distinction between believers and heretics. The troops under his orders--wild mercenaries with more of the brigand than of the disciplined soldier--wasted the country with fire and sword. From the frightful detail of cruelties one little fact may be gathered characteristic of the man. All the inhabitants of the town of Mérindol, which stood on the Durance,[14] were put to the sword, with the exception of one person, a poor idiot, who had ransomed his life by promising a soldier two crowns. Oppède heard of it, and sending for the soldier, gave him the two crowns, and having thus bought the prisoner, ordered him to be tied to a tree and shot forthwith. “I know how to treat these people,” he roared out; “I will send them, children and all, to live in hell.” The small town of Cabrières, in the same neighborhood and a little south of the poetic Vaucluse, was treated with similar severity. Every house was destroyed; between 700 and 800 persons were killed in the streets or fields; a number of women who had fled for refuge to a barn were burned to death, and those who had escaped the sword and fire were sent to the galleys “with circumstances of inhumanity,” says the historian, “that would have deserved our pity on any other occasion.”[15] “In one church,” says Guérin, “I saw between four and five hundred poor souls of women and children butchered.” Twenty-five women-- Præcipites atra ceu tempestate columbæ Condensæ--