At Macon, where the church was barely two years old, the Huguenots made themselves masters of the city, which was recovered by Tavannes a few months later (19th August, 1562). He plundered every thing on which he could lay his hand, and is reported to have picked up enough to buy an estate of 10,000 livres a year. His wife, who was equally unscrupulous, contrived to fill one hundred and eighty trunks with linen, jewelry, ornaments, etc. No wonder that, after such an example, men of high rank fomented discord and cherished persecution. St. Point was appointed governor. He was the son of a priest, and “thoroughly bloody and more than cruel,” said Beza. After dinner, when the ladies went out to walk, he used to amuse them by throwing his prisoners off the bridge into the Saone, jesting at their struggles to save their lives. This savage sport the Catholics named “la farce de St. Point;” but it is better known in history as the “sauteries,” or “leaps of Macon.” The governor justified these cruelties as being mere retaliation for similar barbarities committed by Des Adrets at Montbrison, which the latter in his turn justified by the outrages at Orange. Thus one excess leads to another: _abyssus abyssum invocat_. At Limoux in Languedoc, the disturbances were so many and so often accompanied by loss of life that Marshal de Foix entered the town to enforce the law (6th June, 1562). This he effected by letting his soldiery loose upon the inhabitants without distinction of religion. One Catholic, dwelling outside the walls, had his eyes plucked out and his nose cut off; another was killed as he left mass, and his body thrown naked into the road. The value of the booty acquired by the marshal was estimated at three or four hundred thousand livres. At Castelnaudary, as the Catholics were walking in procession on Palm Sunday (1562), they set fire to a mill in which the Protestants were worshiping outside the town, and killed all who tried to escape. The number of victims amounted to sixty, among whom were the treasurer of Catherine de Medicis, three municipal councilors, and the minister, whose bowels were torn out and burned in a bonfire. At St. Calais in the Vendomois the Protestants put a garrison in the monastery, which was like a fortress, with its ditches, ramparts, and flanking towers. The monks called for help, and one day, when the bell rang for vespers, they headed their allies and killed thirty of the Huguenots. A bloody retaliation soon followed: a resolute band, collected from the surrounding district, stormed the abbey and put to death nearly all the priests and monks they found in it. At Issoudun in Berry (Aug., 1562), the soldiery rebaptized the little Huguenot children, even a girl of thirteen being held naked over the font. One Furet was about to be hanged without trial, and had already mounted the ladder, when the king’s advocate suggested that it would be well to go through some judicial formality.