ortured with painful wounds that prolonged
their agonies till death was rather desired than dreaded, or were hurled
down upon pikes and halberds, or were hung to pot-hooks and roasted in the
fire, or were hacked in pieces. Not a few of the women were treated with
dishonor; the greater part were hung to doors and windows, and their dead
bodies, stripped naked, were submitted to indignities for which the annals
of warfare, except among the most ferocious savages, can scarcely supply a
parallel. That the Almighty might not seem to be insulted in the persons
only of living creatures formed in His own image, the fresh impiety was
perpetrated of derisively stuffing leaves torn from French Bibles into the
gaping wounds of the dead lying on this field of carnage. Nor did the
Roman Catholics of Orange fare much better than their reformed neighbors.
Mistaken for enemies, they were massacred in the public square, where they
had assembled, expecting rather to receive a reward for their services in
assisting the pontifical troops to enter, than to atone for their
treachery by their own death.[101]

[Sidenote: Francois de Beaumont, Baron des Adrets.]

But the time for revenge soon came around. The barbarous warfare initiated
by the adherents of the triumvirate in Dauphiny and Provence bred or
brought forward a leader and soldiers who did not hesitate to repay
cruelty with cruelty. Francois de Beaumont, Baron des Adrets, was a
merciless general, who affected to believe that rigor and strict
retaliation were indispensable to remove the contempt in which the
Huguenots were held, and who knew how by bold movements to appear where
least expected, and by vigor to multiply the apparent size of his army.
Attached to the Reformation only from ambition, and breathing a spirit
far removed from the meekness of the Gospel, he soon awakened the horror
of his comrades in arms, and incurred the censure of Conde for his
barbarities; so that, within a few months, becoming disgusted with the
Huguenots, he went over to the papal side, and in the second civil war was
found fighting against his former associates.[102] Meantime, his brief
connection with the Huguenots was a blot upon their escutcheon all the
more noticeable because of the prevailing purity;[103] and the injury he
inflicted upon the cause of Protestantism far more than cancelled the
services he rendered at Lyons and elsewhere. At Pierrelate he permitted
his soldiers to take signal vengeance