hich their Redeemer
had lived and died an ignominious and cruel death, it was at Vezelay
that Pope Eugenius III. assembled a great council of the princes of the
church, the great barons, and chivalry of those times. It was in her
immense cathedral, one of the oldest and largest in the kingdom, amidst
the clang of arms, war cries, and religious chaunts, and in the presence
of Louis le Jeune, King of France, that St. Bernard preached, in 1146,
the Second Crusade.

Vezelay is celebrated as having been the birth-place of Beza, the great
Protestant Reformer (1519), who succeeded not only to the place but to
the influence of Calvin, and was, after that eminent man's death,
regarded as the head and leader of the Genevese church.

It was to Vezelay, the only town that dared to offer them the protection
of its walls, that the unfortunate Protestants fled after the horrible
massacre of St. Bartholomew's--the base political cruelty of the brutal
homicide, Charles IX. Tracked and hunted down like wild beasts, and a
price set upon their heads, they found staunch and noble hearts in the
inhabitants of Vezelay; but, ere long, an army of their insatiable foes
arrived and besieged the town, and treachery at a postern one stormy
night made them masters of it, when scenes of horror followed under the
mask of religion that even at this distance of time make one recoil with
terror and disgust at the dogmas of the corrupt faith which dictated
them.

Roasting men alive, and boiling women, dashing out the brains of many a
cherub boy and prattling girl, was the pleasing and satisfactory pastime
with which Pope Gregory, Catherine de Medicis, and her congenial son
gladdened their Christian hearts. The blood of their victims still cries
to us from the ground of their Golgotha; for on the south side of the
town there is a large green field, called _Le Champ des Huguenots_. The
damning fact, from which this spot received its name, has been handed
down to us by the historian. It is as follows:

The Catholics, having instituted a strict search in the woods and
caverns of the environs, made so many prisoners that they were puzzled
what to do with them--nay, in what manner they should take their lives.
Among many ingenious experiments, it was suggested that they should bury
them alive up to their necks in the field to which we have alluded; and
this was accordingly done with nine of them, whose heads were bowled at
with cannon-balls taken from the a