here the number of Protestants
was small, and especially where they had never rendered themselves
formidable, it was not easy for the clergy to excite the people to that
frenzy of sectarian hatred under the influence of which they were willing
to imbrue their hands in the blood of peaceable neighbors. In such
places--in Provins, for instance--the Huguenots generally kept themselves
as far as possible out of sight, while a few of the more timid consented
to place a white cross on their hats, a convenient badge of Roman
Catholicism which some were willing to assume, when they would rather have
died than go to mass.[1137]

[Sidenote: Policy of the Guises.]

In the province of Champagne the Protestants were spared any general
massacre by the prudent foresight of the Guises, to whom its government
was confided. The duke, in order to free himself from the imputation of
being the author of the bloody plot, and to prove that his private
resentment did not extend beyond Admiral Coligny and a few other chiefs,
had himself taken several Huguenots in Paris under his special protection.
With the same object in view, he made his province an exception to the
widespread slaughter.[1138]

[Sidenote: Spurious accounts of clemency.]

[Sidenote: Bishop Le Hennuyer, of Lisieux.]

Others, however, were, merciful from more honorable motives. A number of
instances of clemency are mentioned. It is not, indeed, always safe to
accept the stories, some of which are suspicious from their very form,
while others are manifest inventions of an age when tolerance had become
more popular than persecution. To the category of fable we are compelled
to assign the famous response which Le Hennuyer, Bishop of Lisieux, is
reported, by authors writing long after the event, as having returned to
the lieutenant sent to him by Charles the Ninth. History is occasionally
capricious, but she has rarely indulged in a more remarkable freak than
when putting into the mouth of an advocate of persecution, a courtier and
the almoner of the king, who was not even in his diocese, but undoubtedly
in Paris itself, at the time the incident is said to have occurred, this
declamatory speech: "No, no, sir; I oppose, and shall always oppose, the
execution of such an order. I am the shepherd of the church of Lisieux,
and the people I am commanded to slaughter are my flock. Although at
present wanderers, having strayed from the fold intrusted to me by Jesus
Christ the great she