The cardinal said he had permission under the king’s letters patent to travel with an armed retinue. “Then he ought to have shown them to me,” said Montmorency, “and I would have allowed him to pass.” The governor, rendered uneasy by the threatening posture of the Lorraine party in the city, invited the assistance of Coligny, who entered Paris with 1200 gentlemen, greatly to the terror of the citizens, who feared their streets would be converted into a battle-field; but the admiral conducted himself so prudently, that he was complimented by the University and the trade guilds. But nothing that the king or his mother could do was effectual to dissipate the mutual distrust with which Catholics and Huguenots still regarded each other. Every act was viewed with suspicion, and to a great extent the misgivings of the Protestants were justified by the way in which the edicts of toleration were strained against them. “The Huguenots,” says Pasquier, who was no friend to them, “have lost more by edicts in time of peace than by force in time of war.”[377] At Lyons they were accused of an attempt to blow up the city with gunpowder, and on this idle charge the governor prevented their assembling for public worship. Every Protestant was expelled from Avignon, and the city and surrounding districts were put under martial law. At Foix a number of Huguenots were murdered; at Toulouse many were judicially put to death. These are but a small sample of the Protestant grievances. A remonstrance presented to the king by the nobles of the Reformed religion in Maine displays a terrible picture of the disturbed state of that province. The Dame de la Guynandière was murdered, with her son, three daughters, and two waiting-women, by a troop of ruffians from Le Mans, who afterward turned the pigs into the house to devour the dead bodies. The bishop of the diocese, a man of dissolute life, used to ride about attended by one hundred and fifty men armed with pistols or arquebuses. One Hélie, a priest, was accused of indescribable acts of brutality toward nine little girls. That and many other such horrors fill a pamphlet of more than one hundred pages, and the perpetrators (as was usually the case) escaped punishment.[378]