ace de Greve was the scene of
mutilations, tortures, hangings, and quarterings of criminals and
traitors, the king and his court sometimes looking on. Coiners of
false money were boiled alive at the pig-market; robbers and assassins
were broken on the wheel and left to linger in slow agony (_tant
qu'ils pourraient languir_). The Lutherans were treated like vermin,
and to harbour them, to possess or print or translate one of their
books, meant a fiery death. In 1525 a young Lutheran student was put
in a tumbril and brought before the churches of Notre Dame and St.
Genevieve, crying mercy from God and Mary and St. Genevieve; he was
then taken to the Place Maubert, where, after his tongue had been
pierced, he was strangled and burnt. A _gendarme_ of the Duke of
Albany was burnt at the pig-market for having sown Lutheran errors in
Scotland.

[Footnote 110: "The moral brutality of the Renaissance is clearly shown
in its punishments. In this matter it reached with perfection its
prototype, the times of the cruel Roman Emperors.... Never has
'justice' been more barbarous; not even in the darkest Middle Ages has
torture been more refined, more devilish, than in the days of
Humanism.... Truly it is no accident that immediately after, indeed,
even before, the end of the Renaissance, everywhere in Western Europe
the fires began to glow wherein thousands of unhappy wretches expired
in torments for the sake of their faith; men's minds were only too
well prepared for such horrors." GUSTAV KORTING (_Anfaenge der
Renaissancelitteratur_, pp. 161, 162.)]

On Corpus Christi day, 1532, a great procession was formed, the king
and provost walking bare-headed to witness the burning of six
Lutherans--a scene often repeated. The Fountain of the Innocents, the
Halles, the Temple, the end of the Pont St. Michel, the Place Maubert,
and the Rue St. Honore were indifferently chosen for these ghastly
scenes. Almost daily the fires burnt. A woman was roasted to death for
eating flesh on Fridays. In 1535, so savage were the persecutions,
that Pope Paul III., with that gentleness which almost invariably has
characterised the popes of Rome in dealing with heresy, wrote to
Francis protesting against the horrible and execrable punishments
inflicted on the Lutherans, and warned him that although he acted from
good motives, yet he must remember that God the Creator, when in this
world, used mercy rather than rigorous justice, and that it was a
cruel death