ess, the
nuns were astoundingly passive, enduring the life of the seraglio and
even worse.[93] Our French women, on the contrary, gifted with a
personality at once strong, lively, and hard to please, were equally
dreadful in their jealousy and in their hate; and being devils indeed
without metaphor, were accordingly rash, blusterous, and prompt to
accuse. Their revelations were very plain, so plain indeed at the
last, that everyone felt ashamed; and after thirty years and three
special cases, the whole thing, begun as it was through terror, got
fairly extinguished in its own dulness beneath hisses of general
disgust.

[93] See Del Rio, Llorente Ricci, &c.

It was not in Loudun, amidst crowds of Poitevins, in the presence of
so many scoffing Huguenots, in the very town where they held their
great national synods, that one would have looked for an event so
discreditable to the Catholics. But these latter, living, as it were,
in a conquered country,[94] in the old Protestant towns, with the
greatest freedom, and thinking, not without cause, of the people they
had often massacred and but lately overcome, were not the persons to
say a word about it. Catholic Loudun, composed of magistrates,
priests, monks, a few nobles, and some workmen, dwelled aloof from the
rest, like a true conquering settlement. This settlement, as one might
easily guess, was rent in twain by the rivalry of the priests and the
monks.

[94] The capture of Rochelle, the last of the Huguenot
strongholds took place in 1628.--TRANS.

* * * * *

The monks, being numerous and proud, as men specially sent forth to
make converts, kept the pick of the pavement against the Protestants,
and were confessing the Catholic ladies, when there arrived from
Bordeaux a young vicar, brought up by the Jesuits, a man of letters,
of pleasing manners, who wrote well and spoke better. He made a noise
in the pulpit, and ere long in the world. By birth a townsman of
Mantes, of a wrangling turn, he was Southern by education, with all
the readiness of a Bordelais, boastful and frivolous as a Gascon. He
soon managed to set the whole town by the ears, drawing the women to
his side, while the men were mostly against him. He became lofty,
insolent, unbearable, devoid of respect for everything. The Carmelites
he overwhelmed with jibes; he would rail away from his pulpit against
monks in general. They choked with rage at his sermons. Proud