rities, judicial or administrative, but more
often through the mere brutal explosion of the people's passions. It is
distasteful to us to drag numerous examples from oblivion; but we will
cite just two, faithful representations of those sad incidents, and
attested by authentic documents. The little town of Gaillac was almost
entirely Catholic; the Protestants, less numerous, had met the day after
Pentecost, May 18, 1562, to celebrate the Lord's Supper. "The
inhabitants in the quarter of the Chateau de l'Orme, who are all artisans
or vine-dressers," says the chronicler, "rush to arms, hurry along with
them all the Catholics of the town, invest the place of assembly, and
take prisoners all who were present. After this capture, they separate:
some remain in the meeting-house, on guard over the prisoners; the rest
go into dwellings to work their will upon those of the religion who had
remained there. Then they take the prisoners, to the number of sixty or
eighty, into a gallery of the Abbey of St. Michael, situated on a steep
rock, at the base of which flows the River Tarn; and there, a field
laborer, named Cabral, having donned the robe and cape of the judge's
deputy, whom he had slain with his own hand, pronounces judgment, and
sentences all the prisoners to be thrown from the gallery into the river,
telling them to go and eat fish, as they had not chosen to fast during
Lent; which was done forthwith. Divers boatmen who were on the river
despatched with their oars those who tried to save themselves by
swimming." [_Histoire generale du Languedoc,_ liv. xxxviii. f. v., p.
227.] At Troyes, in Champagne, "during the early part of August, 1572,
the majority of the Protestants of the town, who were returning from
Esleau-Mont, where they had a meeting-house and a pastor under
authorization from the king, were assailed in the neighborhood of
Croncels by the excited populace. A certain number of individuals,
accompanying a mother carrying a child which had just received baptism,
were pursued with showers of stones; several were wounded, and the child
was killed in its mother's arms." This affair did not give rise to any
prosecution. "It is no use to think about it any longer," said the
delegate of the bailiff and of the mayor of Troyes, in a letter from
Paris on the 27th of August. The St. Bartholomew had just taken place
on the 24th of August. [_Histoire de la Ville de Troyes,_ by H. Boutiot,
t. iii. p. 25.]

Wher