city
where, free from the temptation to conformity with the dominant
religion, they received a training adapted to qualify them for
usefulness in their native land.[577]

[Sidenote: Marshal Vieilleville refuses to profit by confiscation.]

Yet the publication of the Edict of Chateaubriand 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.[578] 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.[579]

[Sidenote: The "Five Scholars of Lausanne."]

Of the considerable number of those upon whom the "very rigorous
procedures" laid down by the Edict of Chateaubriand were executed in
almost all parts of France, according to the historian of the reformed
churches,[580] the "_Five Scholars of Lausanne_" deserve particular
mention. Natives of different points in France, these young men, with
others, had enjoyed in the distinguished school inst