Henry M. Baird · 108 of 379

CHAPTER VIII · Progress in Normandy.

More than three years had passed away since the publication of the Edict of Châteaubriand, but none of the fruits which its authors had predicted were visible. The number of the reformed brought to trial, and especially of those condemned to the flames, gradually diminished, whilst it was notorious that the opponents of the dominant church were rapidly multiplying. In some provinces—in Normandy, for example—their placards were mysteriously posted on the walls, and their songs deriding the Franciscan monks were sung in the dark lanes of the cities. Once they had ventured to interrupt the discourse of a preacher on the topic of purgatory, by loud expressions of dissent; but when on the next day the subject was resumed, numbers of hearers left the church with cries of "au fol, au fol," and forced those who would have arrested them in the name of the Cardinal Archbishop of Rouen, to seek refuge from a shower of stones in an adjoining monastery.