receipt of the
intelligence. The road to Paris lay open to the victorious army. The
king, not less than the people, expected to hear the Spaniards within a
few brief days thundering at the very gates of the city. Charles the
Fifth, from his retirement at Yuste, is said to have asked the courier
with impatience, whether his son was already in Paris.[629] In the minds
of the populace, disappointment and fear were mingled with rage against
"the accursed sect of the Lutherans"--the reputed authors of all the
public calamities. Every prediction which the priests had for a
generation been ringing in the ears of the people seemed now to be in
course of fulfilment. In the startling defeat of a large and
well-appointed army of France, led by an experienced general, all eyes
read tokens of the evident displeasure of the Almighty, not because of
the ignorance and immorality of the people, or the bad doctrine and
worse lives of its spiritual leaders, or the barbarous cruelty, the
shameless impurity, and unexampled bad faith of the court; but because
of the existence of heretics who denied the authority of the Pope, and
refused to bow down and worship the transubstantiated wafer. The popular
anger was the more ready to kindle because the harsh measures of the
government had confessedly failed of accomplishing their object, and
because--to use the expressive language of the royal edict--the fire
still burned beneath the ashes.[630] An incident which happened little
more than a fortnight after the battle of St. Quentin disclosed the
bitter fruits of the slanderous reports and violent teachings
disseminated among the excitable inhabitants of Paris.

[Sidenote: The affair of the Rue St. Jacques, Sept. 4, 1557.]

[Sidenote: Assault upon the worshippers.]

The Protestants of the capital, far from rejoicing over the misfortunes
of the kingdom, as their adversaries falsely asserted, met even more
frequently than before to offer their united prayers in its behalf. On
the evening of the fourth of September, 1557,[631] three or four hundred
persons, of every rank of society, quietly repaired to a house in the
Rue St. Jacques, almost under the very shadow of the Sorbonne, where the
sacrament of the Lord's Supper was to be administered according to
previous appointment. Their coming together had not been so noiseless,
however, as to escape the attention of some priests, residing in the
College du Plessis, on the other side of the way, whose su