two lines of soldiers and with his guns bearing on the suspected points, he ordered the inhabitants to bring all their arms to the citadel.  Executions followed immediately after this moral as well as material victory.  “More than a hundred and forty persons were put to death by various kinds of punishments,” says Vieilleville; “and, by a most equitable sentence, when the executioner had in his hands the three insurgents who had beaten to death and thrown into the river the two collectors of the Babel at Angouleme, he cast them all three into a fire which was ready at the spot, and said to them aloud, in conformity with the judgment against them, ’Go, rabid hounds, and grill the fish of the Charente, which ye salted with the bodies of the officers of your king and sovereign lord.’  As to civil death (loss of civil rights),” adds Vieilleville, “nearly all the inhabitants made honorable amends in open street, on their knees, before the said my lords at the window, crying mercy and asking pardon; and more than a hundred, because of their youth, were simply whipped.  Astounding fines and interdictions were laid as well upon the body composing the court of Parliament as upon the town-council and on a great number of private individuals.  The very bells were not exempt from experiencing the wrath and vengeance of the prince, for not a single one remained throughout the whole city or in the open country—­to say nothing of the clocks, which were not spared either —­which was not broken up and confiscated to the king’s service for his guns.”

The insurrection at Bordeaux against the gabel in 1548 was certainly more serious than that of Rochelle in 1542; but it is also quite certain that Francis I. would not have set about repressing it as Henry II. did; he would have appeared there himself and risked his own person instead of leaving the matter to the harshest of his lieutenants, and he would have more skilfully intermingled generosity with force, and kind words with acts of severity.  And that is one of the secrets of governing.  In 1549, scarcely a year after the revolt at Bordeaux, Henry II., then at Amiens, granted to deputies from Poitou, Rochelle, the district of Aunis, Limousin, Perigord, and Saintonge, almost complete abolition of the Babel in Guienne, which paid the king, by way of compensation, two hundred thousand crowns of gold for the expenses of war or the redemption of certain alienated domains.  We may admit that on the day after the revolt the arbitrary and bloody proceedings of the Constable de Montmorency must have produced upon the insurgents of Bordeaux the effect of a salutary fright; but we may doubt whether so cruel a repression was absolutely indispensable in 1548, when in 1549 the concession demanded in the former year was to be recognized as necessary.