Page:Margaret of Angoulême, Queen of Navarre (Robinson 1886).djvu/209

194 1541. For the writ of 1540 had merely condemned to death the head of every household, confiscated the property of the heretics, ordered every house to be razed, every orchard to be uprooted, every tree to be burned as accursed. But this new writ, which the King had never read, condemned all to death alike: all men and women, children and babies at the breast. The heretics were to be exterminated, root and branch.

D'Oppède no sooner received the writ than swiftly and silently he marched upon the seventeen Vaudois villages. Several of them were situate in the Papal territory of Avignon, but he easily procured permission to invade them in so good a cause. D'Oppède marched on at the head of a strange and ferocious army; they were the soldiers from the galleys whom he led, a fierce and reckless crowd. Yet even they paused when they discovered that no war but sheer slaughter was before them. D'Oppède had, at first, some difficulty in cheering them on to the general pillage, slaughter and rapine. But having once tasted blood, they entered into the spirit of their crusade. They began by destroying Cabrières and Mérindol with fire. All that ran out of the flames were cut down by the soldiery.

In one church four hundred women and children, who had sheltered there, were slaughtered in one day. The rude galley soldiers learned new devices and caprices in the art of murder; they discovered a thousand ways to send a heretic to hell. On they marched, leaving behind them smoking ruins and uprooted orchards, skeletons and corpses, where they had found the pious shepherds content in their fairy-haunted homes. The poor Fantines must have fled aghast from this new world of flames and shrieking. No home was safe; even under the earth the soldiers