In 1532, at Pleinpalais, a suburb of Geneva, some rascals from among a band of gipsies, consisting of upwards of three hundred in number, fell upon several of the officers who were stationed to prevent their entering the town.  The citizens hurried up to the scene of disturbance.  The gipsies retired to the monastery of the Augustin friars, in which they fortified themselves:  the bourgeois besieged them, and would have committed summary justice on them, but the authorities interfered, and some twenty of the vagrants were arrested, but they sued for mercy, and were discharged.

[Illustration:  Fig. 372.—­Gipsy Encampment.—­Fac-simile of a Copper-plate by Callot.]

In 1632, the inhabitants of Viarme, in the Department of Lot-et-Garonne, made an onslaught upon a troop of gipsies who wanted to take up their quarters in that town.  The whole of them were killed, with the exception of their chief, who was taken prisoner and brought before the Parliament of Bordeaux, and ordered to be hung.  Twenty-one years before this, the mayor and magistrates of Bordeaux gave orders to the soldiers of the watch to arrest a gipsy chief, who, having shut himself up in the tower of Veyrines, at Merignac, ransacked the surrounding country.  On the 21st of July, 1622, the same magistrates ordered the gipsies to leave the parish of Eysines within twenty-four hours, under penalty of the lash.

It was not often that the gipsies used violence or openly resisted authority; they more frequently had recourse to artifice and cunning in order to attain their end.  A certain Captain Charles acquired a great reputation amongst them for the clever trickeries which he continually conceived, and which his troop undertook to carry out.  A chronicler of the time says, that by means of certain herbs which he gave to a half-starved horse, he made him into a fat and sleek animal; the horse was then sold at one of the neighbouring fairs or markets, but the purchaser detected the fraud within a week, for the horse soon became thin again, and usually sickened and died.

Tallemant des Reaux relates that, on one occasion, Captain Charles and his attendants took up their quarters in a village, the cure of which being rich and parsimonious, was much disliked by his parishioners.  The cure never left his house, and the gipsies could not, therefore, get an opportunity to rob him.  In this difficulty, they pretended that one of them had committed a crime, and had been condemned to be hung a quarter of a league from the village, where they betook themselves with all their goods.  The man, at the foot of the gibbet, asked for a confessor, and they went to fetch the cure.  He, at first, refused to go, but his parishioners compelled him.  During his absence some gipsies entered his house, took five hundred ecus from his strong box, and quickly rejoined the troop.  As soon as the rascal saw them returning, he said that he appealed to the king of la petite Egypte, upon which the captain exclaimed, “Ah! the traitor!  I expected he would appeal.”  Immediately they packed up, secured the prisoner, and were far enough away from the scene before the cure re-entered his house.