Simony is openly permitted. Benefices are held by married gentlewomen who employ the revenues far differently to the intention of the founders. The people are left without religious instruction and thus stray from the true religion. There is but little justice to be obtained through the venality of the tribunals, causing their neighbors to hold them in abomination. The number of those holding office is very great and part of them notoriously incapable and the rest poor, being thereby prone to evil actions. Justice is further impeded by the impunity with which murder is committed. Great cruelties and barbarities are committed by the foot soldiers and by the gendarmerie, which does not now consist of gentlemen but of persons of vile condition. Not only by these, but by the soldiers of his guard, is pillage made on the houses of his people, ecclesiastical holdings, and hospitals even in Paris itself, so that the poor cannot obtain common necessaries.[1727] During these weeks Montmorency had earnestly labored in favor of peace, pleading, arguing, expostulating both with his own younger brothers and Alençon. He was as earnestly supported by Catherine de Medici, now converted to a peace policy by the force of events,[1728] but both were continually thwarted either by the King’s inconstancy or the machinations of the Guises. The illness of the queen mother—she suffered so much from sciatica that often she was unable to leave her chamber—and the frivolity of the King were a positive advantage to the Guises’ policy. It will be remembered that the fortress of La Fère had been tentatively demanded of the King for the prince of Condé. Henry III had replied offering Doulens in Picardy instead of either La Fère or Peronne, which was later suggested, on the plea that he could not exact obedience from the inhabitants of the latter places. This demand for a border fortress near Flanders was made by the duke of Alençon, in reality to further his own advantage in the Spanish Netherlands, and he took the method of having Condé take title to it as a means of concealing his purpose.