atred moved him, strictly prohibited the intrusion of
Protestants into the churches, and assured the ecclesiastics of protection
so long as they chose to remain in the city. For a time, consequently,
their services continued to be celebrated in the presence of the faithful
few and with closed doors; but soon, their fears getting the better of
their prudence, the priests and monks one by one made their retreat from
the Protestant capital. On the twenty-first of April, word was brought to
Conde that some of the churches had been broken into during the preceding
night, and that the work of destruction was at that very moment going
forward in others. Hastening, in company with Coligny and other leaders,
to the spacious and imposing church of the Holy Rood (Sainte Croix), he
undertook, with blows and menaces, to check the furious onslaught. Seeing
a Huguenot soldier who had climbed aloft, and was preparing to hurl from
its elevated niche one of the saints that graced the wall of the church,
the prince, in the first ebullition of his anger, snatched an arquebuse
from the hands of one of his followers, and aimed it at the adventurous
iconoclast. The latter had seen the act, but was in no wise daunted. Not
desisting an instant from his pious enterprise, "Sir," he cried to Conde,
"have patience until I shall have overthrown this idol; and then let me
die, if that be your pleasure!"[89]

The Huguenot soldier's fearless reply sounded the knell of many a sacred
painting and statue; for the destruction was accepted as God's work rather
than man's.[90] Henceforth little exertion was made to save these objects
of mistaken devotion, while the greatest care was taken to prevent the
robbery of the costly reliquaries and other precious possessions of the
churches, of which inventories were drawn up, and which were used only at
the last extremity.[91]

[Sidenote: Massacre of Huguenots at Sens.]

Far different in character from the bloodless "massacres" of images and
pictures in cities where the Huguenots gained the upper hand, were the
massacres of living men wherever the papists retained their superiority.
One of the most cruel and inexcusable was that which happened at Sens--a
city sixty-five or seventy miles toward the south-east from Paris--where,
on an ill-founded and malicious rumor that the reformed contemplated
rising and destroying their Roman Catholic neighbors, the latter, at the
instigation, it is said, of their archbishop, th