A Huguenot inhabitant of the city, by the patient labor of fifteen nights, filed away the bar of an iron gate which ran across a brook, and through the opening twenty of the banished citizens re-entered the place and made themselves masters of it in a few minutes. At Cognat, near Gannat, the Calvinists of Auvergne, under the command of Poncenac and Valbeleix, gained a pitched battle over the Catholics, in whose ranks the Bishop of Le Puy, armed in helmet and cuirass, fought like Orson with a ponderous club. At Dieppe the Huguenots were commanded to leave the town or go to mass, and all refugees were summoned to return under pain of having their property confiscated. Not one obeyed the order. No Catholic was allowed to keep a Huguenot servant; and all resistance was punished by the strappado, or by a penitential progress through the city, which sometimes ended in a flogging in the market-place, more frequently in a hanging. But violence was not confined to one side only. The Protestants of the neighborhood of Aurillac surprised that city, which in retaliation for the brutalities committed in 1562 they sacked and destroyed. They buried some Catholics alive up to the chin, and after a series of filthy outrages, used their heads as targets for their muskets.[443] Four hundred persons were put to death, of whom 130 were heads of families. Early in the spring the Huguenot army moved northward, and halting at Nismes, which they reached in April, Coligny laid before them the plan of his new campaign. He proposed marching up the Rhone, and through Burgundy, so as to threaten Paris on the east, while the royal armies were occupied in the west, and separated from him by rugged mountain ranges. The boldness of the design startled the southern Protestants, who refused to be taken so far from their homes; but about 5000 men agreed to follow him, of whom 3000 were arquebusiers, whom he mounted on horseback.[444] With this flying camp he advanced to the Rhone, and sending a detachment up the right bank to seek recruits in the Vivarrais and the Cevennes, he crossed with the remainder into Dauphiny, where Gordes was too weak to make effectual resistance. Continual skirmishes, and petty sieges harassed, but did not interrupt, Coligny’s progress; but the army suffered such great hardships, that his illness, which compelled them to halt on St. Etienne in Forez, was considered as any thing but a calamity. For some time he lay between life and death, and his soldiers now first learned his value from their fear of losing him. During three weeks the troops remained inactive; a precious time which they employed in repairing some of the damage they had suffered during their long march, and where they received a most welcome reinforcement of 1500 cavalry under Briquemault.