Page:Margaret of Angoulême, Queen of Navarre (Robinson 1886).djvu/211

196 Perhaps, believing De Tournon's report, she thought of these Vaudois not as martyrs, but as rebels who would wage a civil war against her brother; and for her brother's sake she could be very hard. We remember the marriage of the brave little Jeanne; and we know that Margaret had no mercy in her heart for those who questioned the authority of the King. But, in any case, she must have been most miserable, whether because her brother's kingdom seemed crumbling to ashes in his hand; or because of a cruel unnecessary sacrifice of innocent lives, a sacrifice that once she might have prevented, and which she had no longer the influence to prevent. These must have been wretched days to Margaret, for her life, it appeared, had been used in vain.

The King himself was aghast, ashamed. When the tidings of the massacre reached him, he sent for D'Oppède; and it required all the influence of De Tournon to save that violent baron from a violent end. Francis declared that his commands had been cruelly exceeded; and though D'Oppède escaped with his life, he left the Court a disgraced and branded man.

The ruins of the Vaudois villages were still warm and smoking, the eagles and vultures still swooped down on the unburied corpses in the trampled Vaudois meadows, the fierce autumn heats made that place of desolation a place of pestilence and danger till, when Francis and his favourite son, the Duke of Orleans (for whose sake all these things were done), set out for Boulogne to make one last effort to recover the port from the English, before signing the treaty with Henry VIII. The plague ravaged the French and English camps, so that more than a hundred soldiers died every day in the huddled army before