Montluc complacently adds, “And this was the first execution I ordered after starting from home, without trial or sentence, for I have heard say that in these matters you should hang first.... It shut the mouths of many seditious people.” He avenged M. Fumel’s murder by hanging or breaking on the wheel in one day between thirty and forty persons, innocent as well as guilty. The hot-headed Huguenots of the south retaliated at Cahors by hanging as many Catholics as they could catch, fourteen or fifteen in number, who had assisted Montluc in his atrocities. At Gironde he made a capture of some eighty Huguenots, of whom he hanged seventy to the pillars of the market-house “sans autre cérémonie.” Describing his doings at the village of Feugaroles, he says: “We were so few that we were not able to kill all: the bandoliers shot them down like game.” In one of his expeditions he fell in with the Queen of Navarre, who received him very badly, and to his great surprise “called him a tyrant,” and otherwise reproached him. His ferocity he considered a virtue, and justified his cruelty as necessary to get the better of his enemies. “God,” he adds, “must be very merciful to us, considering the evils we commit.”[337] He was thankful not without reason, for at the end of the war he was richer by 100,000 crowns. Still more ferocious, and, if possible, with still fewer redeeming qualities, was François de Beaumont, baron des Adrets, whose name is still used in the south to scare naughty children. Ostensibly he was a Protestant, but in reality a mere agent of the queen-mother against the Lorraine party.[338] He would sometimes amuse himself by making his prisoners leap from the top of a tower, or from a high window, on the pikes of his soldiers stationed below. On one occasion--it was at Montbrison, in August, 1562--a prisoner hesitated, upon which Des Adrets reproached him with cowardice. The other retorted: “I dare you to do it in ten times,” which caused his life to be spared. The slaughter in that little town was fearful: more than eight hundred men, women, and children were murdered; the streets were strewn with corpses, and “the gutters looked as if it had rained blood,” says a contemporary. At another time, though this belongs to a different period of his history--the baron marched to besiege Valence, where (as we shall see presently) the Reformed had revolted and seized upon the Grey Friars’ Church. In defiance of his threats, they publicly celebrated the Lord’s Supper in the appropriated church, as many as 5000 partaking of the sacrament. They afterward came to terms with him, agreeing to open their gates and restore the church; but Des Adrets had no sooner entered than he seized a number of Protestants and sentenced them to lose their heads. They were taken to punishment with their mouths gagged; and after being dismembered, their limbs were fastened to the doors of the church they had profaned.[339] Strange to