It is not necessary to dwell upon the sufferings or to count up the number of the victims. Regnier de la Planche describes from personal knowledge the lawless state of the capital. “From August to March there was nothing but arrests and imprisonments, sacking of houses, proclamations of outlawry, and executions of the members of the religion with cruel torments.”[111] Numbers hastened to escape from Paris, and sold their goods to procure the means of flight. The streets were filled with carts laden with furniture, the houses were abandoned to plunderers, the magistrates conniving at the wrong, so that “the poor became rich and the rich poor.” We need not point out what an incentive this was to denunciation, and how often men must have been condemned as heretics whose only fault was their wealth, or their having offended some neighbor. A remarkable passage from Theodore Beza shows how wide and general was the ruin caused by this terrorism. “Poor little children [the children of martyred Reformers], who had no bed but the flag-stones, went crying piteously through the streets with hunger, and yet no one dared relieve them, for fear they should be accused of heresy. So that they were less cared for than dogs.” The pettiest vexations were employed against the Reformers. Crosses and images, with tapers always burning before them, were set up at the corner of every street, and round them gathered a crowd of noisy worshipers, singing, praying, and beating their breasts. If any one refused to take off his hat as he passed, or to put money into the alms-box before the shrine, some dirty priest or monk would raise the cry of “heretic,” and the poor Reformer would be pelted, beaten, and perhaps dragged through the mire to prison. “Death was made a carnival,” says an eloquent Frenchman. It was indeed a show in which the mob--and the same mob reappeared in 1792--feasted their eyes on the sufferings of the Protestants, and often would not allow them to be strangled before they were burned, lest their agonies should be diminished. One Barbeville was thus tortured contrary to the sentence condemning him to be hanged first; but at the same time they rescued a thief from the gallows, “as if they desired to condemn Christ and deliver Barabbas.” To call a man “Lutheran” was to doom him to certain death, often too without any form of justice. By this lynch law many a man worked out his own private revenge: the debtor paid his creditor.[112] Even children dipped their hands in the martyrs’ blood and boasted of it.