bishop of Lisieux, his almoner, reciting fair orisons and lauds to the honour of the glorious Virgin and her image. Again the trumpets, clarions and hautboys played the _Ave Regina caelorum_, and the king, the cardinal of Louvain, and all the nobles presented their tapers to the Virgin. Next day the Parlement, the provost and sheriffs, came and put an iron trellis round the silver image for fear of robbers.[109] [Footnote 108: For the first offence a fine; for the second, the lips to be cloven; for the third, the tongue pierced; for the fourth, death.] [Footnote 109: The image was stolen in 1545 and replaced by one of wood. This was struck down in 1551, and the bishop of Paris substituted for it one of marble.] Never were judicial and ecclesiastical punishments so cruel and recurrent as during the period of the Renaissance. It is a common error to suppose that judicial cruelty reached its culmination in the Middle Ages.[110] Punishments are described with appalling iteration in the pages we are following. The Place de Greve was the scene of mutilations, tortures, hangings, and quarterings of criminals and traitors, the king and his court sometimes looking on. Coiners of false money were boiled alive at the pig-market; robbers and assassins were broken on the wheel and left to linger in slow agony (_tant qu'ils pourraient languir_). The Lutherans were treated like vermin, and to harbour them, to possess or print or translate one of their books, meant a fiery death. In 1525 a young Lutheran student was put in a tumbril and brought before the churches of Notre Dame and St. Genevieve, crying mercy from God and Mary and St. Genevieve; he was then taken to the Place Maubert, where, after his tongue had been pierced, he was strangled and burnt. A _gendarme_ of the Duke of Albany was burnt at the pig-market for having sown Lutheran errors in Scotland. [Footnote 110: "The moral brutality of the Renaissance is clearly shown in its punishments. In this matter it reached with perfection its prototype, the times of the cruel Roman Emperors.... Never has 'justice' been more barbarous; not even in the darkest Middle Ages has torture been more refined, more devilish, than in the days of Humanism.... Truly it is no accident that immediately after, indeed, even before, the end of the Renaissance, everywhere in Western Europe the fires began to glow wherein thousands of unhappy wretches expired in torments for the sake of their faith; men's minds were only too well prepared for such horrors." GUSTAV KORTING (_Anfaenge der Renaissancelitteratur_, pp. 161, 162.)]