Marchioness Pianezza filled the same office over another whose members were ladies! She seems to have breathed the same spirit of ferocity and cunning as that which characterized the conduct of her husband, who commanded the fifteen thousand troops whose gentle entreaties were to win the Vaudois to the orthodoxy of Rome! This army fitly included three regiments of French soldiers, red-handed from the slaughter of the Huguenots; twelve hundred Irish, exiled for their crimes in Ulster; and a number of Piedmontese bandits, attracted by the love of plunder and the promised benedictions of the Church in return for their meritorious labours in extirpating heretics. Two monks led this band of miscreants. One of them, seated on a waggon, brandishing a flaming torch in his left hand and a sword in his right, exhorted the troops to burn and slay. His companion, an aged friar, carried a crucifix before him, exclaiming, "Whoever is a son of the holy church does not pardon heretics; they are the murderers of Christ!" The soldiers, inflamed by these appeals to their fanaticism, went forward with the cry, "Viva la S. Chiesa." They found La Torre deserted; for the people had betaken themselves to the mountains, from whence they could descry the soldiers pillaging their homes. However, they knew that their enemies would not be satisfied with anything less than their lives, and these they resolved to sell as dearly as possible. Pianezza's troops attacked them on the 19th and 20th of April; but the Vaudois on each occasion drove back their assailants with great loss. It was the bravery of the Vaudois at this time that led the Duke of Savoy to say that the skin of a Vaudois cost fifteen or twenty of his best Catholics. Indeed, during this siege fifty of the Piedmontese soldiers were slain by the Vaudois, with only a loss of two by the defenders. The perfidious marquis then resolved to seek by fraud what he was unable to obtain by force.