of the procession, groups of eighty or a hundred
children, who were to cry enthusiastically: "_Vive le roi!_" The
quibbling by which Francois endeavored to justify his refusal to carry
out the provisions of the treaty of Madrid, for which he had left his
two sons as hostages, deceived no one; Charles V very justly proclaimed
him a traitor and perjured, to which the king had no better answer than
that the emperor "lied in his throat," and that he would meet him in the
lists in single combat whenever he liked.

The ransom of the two young princes cost one million two hundred
thousand ecus, a sum which both the king and his capital found it very
difficult to raise. After the treaty of Cambrai, in 1529, Francois
endeavored to strengthen his position by foreign alliances, without any
regard for his standing as eldest son of the Church and persecutor of
Protestants. He made terms with Henry VIII of England, who had just
broken with the Holy See; and he acquired the friendship of the Pope by
demanding for his son, afterward Henri II, the hand of Catherine de
Medicis, niece of the pontiff. He renewed the ancient friendship with
the Scotch by giving his eldest daughter, afterward Marie de Lorraine,
to their king for wife. He even concluded a commercial treaty, and one
of alliance, offensive and defensive, with the Sultan Soliman, who
promised to aid, with all his power, his good friend, "the Padishah of
France."

The first of the followers of Luther to be executed in Paris was burned
alive on the Place de Greve in March, 1525, and from this beginning the
persecution went on, by direction of the king, and even during his
absence, with a cruelty only tempered by the occasional necessity of
conciliating the Protestant allies of the nation. The Sorbonne ordered
that all the writings of Luther should be publicly burned on the Place
du Parvis Notre-Dame; and the king decreed that all persons having in
their possession any of the aforesaid heretical books should deliver
them up, under penalty of banishment and confiscation of all their
property. For the dreary spectacle of a nation and a city divided into
hostile factions, struggling through barbarism and crime to a political
unity and a more beneficent civilization, we have now, just when these
goals seemed to be on the point of being attained, the spectacle of the
same city and nation rent by religious faction, and relapsing into an
even crueller barbarism under all the specious gl