ited the rapacity
of a lawless banditti, unrestrained by civil or military force, and
inveterate against every thing that might be regarded as connected with
the Catholic worship. The Calvinists were masters of Caen, and, incited by
the information of what had taken place at Rouen, they resolved to repeat
the same outrages. Under the specious pretext of abolishing idolatrous
worship, they pillaged and ransacked every church and monastery: they
broke the windows and organs, destroyed the images, stole the
ecclesiastical ornaments, sold the shrines, committed pulpits, chests,
books, and whatever was combustible, to the fire; and finally, after
having wreaked their vengeance upon every thing that could be made the
object of it, they went boldly to the town-hall to demand the wages for
their labours. In the course of these outrages the tomb of the Conqueror
at one abbey and that of Matilda, his queen, at the other, were demolished.
And this was not enough; but a few days afterwards, the same band returned,
allured by the hopes of farther plunder. They dug up the coffin: the
hollow stone rang to the strokes of their daggers: the vibration proved
that it was not filled by the corpse, and nothing more was wanting to seal
its destruction.

De Bourgueville, who went to the spot and exerted his eloquence to check
this last act of violence, witnessed the opening of the coffin. It
contained the bones of the king, wrapped up in red taffety, and still in
tolerable preservation; but nothing else. He collected them with care, and
consigned them to one of the monks of the abbey, who kept them in his
chamber, till the Admiral de Chatillon entered Caen at the head of his
mercenaries, on which occasion the whole abbey was plundered, and the
monks put to flight, and the bones lost. "Sad doings these," says De
Bourgueville, "_et bien peu reformez!_" He adds that one of the
thigh-bones was preserved by the Viscount of Falaise, who was there with
him, and begged it from the rioters, and that this bone was longer by four
fingers' breadth than that of a tall man. The bone thus preserved, was
reinterred, after the cessation of the troubles: it is the same that is
alluded to in the inscription, which also informs us that a monument was
raised over it in 1642, but was removed in 1742, it being then considered
as an incumbrance in the choir.

The melancholy end of the Conqueror, the strange occurrences at his
interment, the violation of his grave,