ted army now returned to Montauban, where, in the midst of a rich
district in part friendly to the Huguenots, it spent the last days of 1569
and the greater part of the month of January, 1570. Its numbers had by
this time received such large accessions, that Coligny wrote to Germany
that he had six or seven thousand horse and fifteen thousand foot.[756] As
the reformed population of Montauban had contributed enough money to
satisfy the prince's indebtedness to the importunate reiters and
lansquenets,[757] the troops were enthusiastic in their devotion to the
cause, and pushed their raids under the intrepid La Loue south of the
Garonne toward the Bay of Biscay, as far as Mont de Marsan and Roquefort
in the "Pays des Landes."[758]

[Sidenote: "Vengeance de Rapin."]

[Sidenote: Coligny pushes on to the Rhone.]

The Huguenots now proceeded towards Toulouse, but that city was too
strongly fortified and garrisoned to tempt them to make an attack. They
inflicted, however, a stern retribution upon the vicinity, devoting to
destruction the villas and pleasure-grounds of the members of a parliament
that had rendered itself infamous for its injustice and blind bigotry. The
cruel fate of Rapin, murdered according to the forms of law, simply
because he was a Protestant and brought from the king an edict containing
too much toleration to suit the inordinate orthodoxy of these robed
fanatics, was yet fresh in the memory of the soldiers, and fired their
blood. On ruined and blackened walls, in more than one quarter, could be
read subsequently the ominous words, written by no idle braggarts:
"_Vengeance de Rapin!_" Leaving the marks of their passage in a desolated
district, the Huguenots swept on to the friendly city of Castres, and
thence through lower Languedoc, by Carcassonne and Montpellier, which they
made no attempt to reduce, to Uzes and Nismes. Meanwhile Piles had from
Castres made a marauding expedition with a body of picked troops to the
very foot of the Pyrenees, and, in retaliation for the aid which the
Spaniards had furnished Charles the Ninth, had penetrated to Perpignan,
and ravaged the County of Roussillon.[759]

[Sidenote: His singular success and its causes.]

Thus the Huguenots--of whom Charles had contemptuously written to his
ambassador at London, in January, that they were in so miserable a plight
that, even since Anjou had dismissed all his men-at-arms after the capture
of Saint Jean d'Angely, they dared not s