ms, in Clement Marot's translation:[510]

Les gens entrez sont en ton heritage:
Ils ont pollu, Seigneur, par leur outrage,
Ton temple sainct, Jerusalem destruite,
Si qu'en monceaux de pierres, l'on reduite.

It was neither the first time, nor was it destined to be by any means
the last, that those rugged, but nervous lines thrilled the souls of the
persecuted Huguenots of France as with the sound of a trumpet, and
braced them to the patient endurance of suffering or to the performance
of deeds of valor.

[Sidenote: The "Fourteen of Meaux."]

Dragged with excessive and unnecessary violence to Paris, the prisoners
were put on trial, and, within a single month, sentence was passed on
them. The crime of having celebrated the Lord's Supper was almost
inexpiable. Fourteen men, with Leclerc their minister, and Etienne
Mangin, in whose house their worship had been held, were condemned to
torture and the stake; others to whipping and banishment; the remainder,
both men and women, to public penance and attendance upon the execution
of their more prominent brethren. Upon one young man, whose tender years
alone saved him from the flames, a sentence of a somewhat whimsical
character was pronounced. He was to be suspended under the arms during
the auto-da-fe of his brethren, and, with a halter around his neck, was
from his elevated position to witness their agony, as an instructive
warning of the dangerous consequence of persistence in heretical errors.
Mangin's house was to be razed, and on the site a chapel of the Virgin
erected, wherein a solemn weekly mass was to be celebrated in honor of
the sacramental wafer, the expense being defrayed by the confiscated
property of the Protestants.

Neither in the monasteries to which they were temporarily allotted, nor
on their way back to Meaux, did the courage of the "Fourteen" desert
them. It was even enhanced by the boldness of a weaver, who, meeting
them in the forest of Livry, cried out: "My brethren, be of good cheer,
and fail not through weariness to give with constancy the testimony you
owe the Gospel. Remember Him who is on high in heaven!"[511]

[Sidenote: Their execution.]

On the seventh of October, Mangin and Leclerc on hurdles, the others on
carts, were taken to the market-square, where fourteen stakes had been
set up in a circle. Here, facing one another, amid the agonies of death,
and in spite of the din made by priests and populace frantically
intoni