d cogent
reasoning, had well-nigh brought the Cardinal of Lorraine to admit that
his view of the Lord's Supper was correct. Catharine's attention having
been for a moment withdrawn, when she returned to the discussion the man
had disappeared. Actuated by curiosity or by a desire to spare his life,
she requested him to be sent for. It was too late; he had already been
despatched.[836] For the most part, the victims displayed great
constancy and courage. Many died with the words of the psalms of Marot
and Beza on their lips.[837] Castelnau, after having in his
interrogatory made patent to all the hypocrisy of the cardinal and the
cowardice of the chancellor, died maintaining that, before he was
pronounced guilty of treason, the Guises ought to be declared kings of
France. Villemongys, upon the scaffold, dipped his hands in the blood of
his companions, and, raising them toward heaven, exclaimed in a loud
voice: "Lord, this is the blood of Thy children, unjustly shed. Thou
wilt avenge it!"[838] The body of La Renaudie was first hung upon one of
the bridges of Amboise, with the superscription: "_La Renaudie, styling
himself Laforest, author of the conspiracy, chief and leader of the
rebels_." Afterward it was quartered, and his head, in company with the
heads of others, was exposed upon a pole on a public square.[839] The
sight of these continually recurring executions, succeeding a fearful
struggle in which so many of his subjects had taken part, is said to
have affected even the young king, who asked, with tears, what he had
done to his people to animate them thus against him. It is even reported
that, catching for an instant, through the mist with which his advisers
sought to keep his mind enshrouded, a glimpse of the true cause of the
discontent, he made a feeble suggestion, which was easily parried, that
the Guises should for a time retire from the court, in order that he
might find out whether the popular enmity was in reality directed
against him, or against his uncles.[840] Their fertile invention,
however, was not slow in concocting a story that turned his short-lived
pity into settled hatred of the "Huguenot heretics."

[Sidenote: The elder D'Aubigne and his son.]

On others, and especially upon those whose hearts throbbed with
patriotic devotion, a less transient impression was made. Some months
after, the young Agrippa d'Aubigne, then a mere child of ten years, was
traversing the city of Amboise with his father.