On Corpus Christi day, 1532, a great procession was formed, the king and provost walking bare-headed to witness the burning of six Lutherans--a scene often repeated. The Fountain of the Innocents, the Halles, the Temple, the end of the Pont St. Michel, the Place Maubert, and the Rue St. Honore were indifferently chosen for these ghastly scenes. Almost daily the fires burnt. A woman was roasted to death for eating flesh on Fridays. In 1535, so savage were the persecutions, that Pope Paul III., with that gentleness which almost invariably has characterised the popes of Rome in dealing with heresy, wrote to Francis protesting against the horrible and execrable punishments inflicted on the Lutherans, and warned him that although he acted from good motives, yet he must remember that God the Creator, when in this world, used mercy rather than rigorous justice, and that it was a cruel death to burn a man alive; he therefore prayed and required the king to appease the fury and rigour of his justice and adopt a policy of mercy and pardon. This noble protest was effective, and some clemency was afterwards shown. But in 1547 the fanatical king, a mass of physical and moral corruption, soured and gloomy, went to his end amid the barbarities wreaked on the unhappy Vaudois Protestants. The cries of three thousand of his butchered subjects and the smoke from the ruins of twenty-five towns and hamlets were the incense of his spirit's flight. One important innovation at court, fraught with evil, is due to Francis. "In the matter of ladies," says Du Bellay, "I must confess that before his time they frequented the court but rarely and in small numbers, but Francis on coming to his kingdom and considering that the whole decoration of a court consisted in the presence of ladies, willed to people it with them more than was the custom in ancient times." Then was begun that unhappy intervention of women in the government of the state, the results of which will be only too evident in the further course of this story. [Illustration: LA FONTAINE DES INNOCENTS.] CHAPTER XII _Rise of the Guises--Huguenot and Catholic--the Massacre of St. Bartholomew_