monks who for a whole generation, in every university and school in France, had been howling down sound science, as well as sound religion; and at Montpellier in 1560-1, their debt was paid them in a very ugly way.  News came down to the hot southerners of Languedoc of the so-called conspiracy of Amboise.—­How the Duc de Guise and the Cardinal de Lorraine had butchered the best blood in France under the pretence of a treasonable plot; how the King of Navarre and the Prince de Conde had been arrested; then how Conde and Coligny were ready to take up arms at the head of all the Huguenots of France, and try to stop this lifelong torturing, by sharp shot and cold steel; then how in six months’ time the king would assemble a general council to settle the question between Catholics and Huguenots.  The Huguenots, guessing how that would end, resolved to settle the question for themselves.  They rose in one city after another, sacked the churches, destroyed the images, put down by main force superstitious processions and dances; and did many things only to be excused by the exasperation caused by thirty years of cruelty.  At Montpellier there was hard fighting, murders—­so say the Catholic historians—­of priests and monks, sack of the new cathedral, destruction of the noble convents which lay in a ring round Montpellier.  The city and the university were in the hands of the Huguenots, and Montpellier became Protestant on the spot.

Next year came the counter blow.  There were heavy battles with the Catholics all round the neighbourhood, destruction of the suburbs, threatened siege and sack, and years of misery and poverty for Montpellier and all who were therein.

Horrible was the state of France in those times of the wars of religion which began in 1562; the times which are spoken of usually as “The Troubles,” as if men did not wish to allude to them too openly.  Then, and afterwards in the wars of the League, deeds were done for which language has no name.  The population decreased.  The land lay untilled.  The fair face of France was blackened with burnt homesteads and ruined towns.  Ghastly corpses dangled in rows upon the trees, or floated down the blood-stained streams.  Law and order were at an end.  Bands of robbers prowled in open day, and bands of wolves likewise.  But all through the horrors of the troubles we catch sight of the little fat doctor riding all unarmed to see his patients throughout Languedoc; going vast distances, his biographers say, by means of regular relays of horses, till he too broke down.  Well for him, perhaps, that he broke down when he did; for capture and recapture, massacre and pestilence, were the fate of Montpellier and the surrounding country, till the better times of Henry IV. and the Edict of Nantes in 1598, when liberty of worship was given to the Protestants for a while.