Henry M. Baird · 104 of 379

CHAPTER VIII · Marshal Vieilleville refuses to profit by confiscation.

Yet the publication of the Edict of Châteaubriand was the signal for the renewal of the severity of the persecution. Every day, says the historian De Thou, persons were burned at Paris on account of religion. Cardinal Tournon and Diana of Poitiers, he tells us, shared in the opprobrium of being the instigators of these atrocities. With the latter it was less fanaticism than a desire to augment the proceeds of the confiscation of the property of condemned heretics which she had lately secured for herself, and was employing to make up the ransom of her two sons-in-law, now prisoners of war. Very few of the courtiers of Henry's court had a spark of the magnanimity that fired the breast of the Marshal de Vieilleville. The name of this nobleman had, unknown to him, been inserted in a royal patent giving to him and others, who desired to shield themselves behind his honorable name, the confiscated goods of all condemned usurers and Lutherans in Guyenne and five other provinces of Southern France. When the document was placed in his hands, and he was assured that it would yield to each of the six patentees twenty thousand crowns within four months, the marshal exclaimed: "And here we stand registered in the courts of parliament as devourers of the people!... Besides that, for twenty thousand crowns to incur individually the curses of a countless number of women and children that will die in the poor-house in consequence of the forfeiture of the lives and property of their husbands and fathers, by fair means or foul—this would be to plunge ourselves into perdition at too cheap a rate!" So saying, Vieilleville drove his dagger through his own name in the patent, and others, through shame, following his example, the document was torn to pieces.