Page:Margaret of Angoulême, Queen of Navarre (Robinson 1886).djvu/117

102 of it, he burst into tears. That cruel blunder, that heartless revenge, lost the cause of the Reform. Many a stake should smoke, and many a rack should strain and creek, in expiation for that murdered stone.

This affair of the placards sent a horror pulsing throughout the length and breadth of France. It frightened from the Reform its gentler and more reverent adherents. Margaret herself, ever compassionate, felt it necessary to declare her Catholicism to the world. Francis henceforth became no less combative than the Sorbonne itself. He set out at once for Paris to sift the matter. No sooner had he reached the capital than in the space of a single night the placards burst out again in hideous flower. They were on all the buildings, all the churches. Even into the King's cabinet they brought their obscene and scurrilous defiance. A vague fear and horror took possession of the town. All through France throbbed that sense of outraged pity for the murdered Redeemer which lay at the bottom of mediæval persecution, blent with that maddening terror of Supernatural Evil, which gave their keenest edge to the cruelties that punished witchcraft. Heresy was, indeed, a sort of witchcraft, a spell wasting the souls of men before the fires of Hell, even as the grosser witches knew how to make men's bodies melt and wane. It is difficult now to place ourselves in this attitude; yet, unless we do so, we can never understand the lesson of the past.

When the King heard of the Virgin's mutilated image, he burst, as I have said, into tears. But his anger was not to end in weeping. A severe inquiry was instituted, and all accused of complicity in this matter were brought to Paris and tried there. The party of the Sorbonne pretended that they had