emed to be nothing they could not lay under contribution to furnish at
least a little nutriment.

And yet ghastly hunger little by little tightened her relentless embrace.
Almost all the children under twelve years of age died. In the universal
reign of famine there were at last found those who were ready to repeat
the horrible crime of feeding upon the flesh of their own kindred. It was
discovered that a husband and wife, with a neighboring crone, had
endeavored to satisfy the gnawings of hunger by eating a newly dead child.
Their guilt came speedily to light, and was punished according to the
severe code of the sixteenth century. The father was sentenced by the
council to be burned alive; his wife to be strangled and her body
consigned to the flames; while the corpse of the old woman who had
instigated the foul deed but had meanwhile died, was ordered to be dug up
and burned. But the feeling of the great majority of the besieged was far
removed from that despair which prompts to an inhuman disregard of natural
decency and affection. Near the close of July a boy of barely ten years,
as he lay on his death-bed, said to his weeping parents: "Why do you weep
thus at seeing me die of hunger? I do not ask bread, mother; I know you
have none. But since God wills that I die thus, we must accept it
cheerfully. Was not that holy man Lazarus hungry? Have I not so read in
the Bible?"[1310]

The catastrophe could not much longer be deferred. Within the city speedy
death stared every man in the face. Permission had, we have seen, been
accorded to the poor, early in June, to go forth from the city walls; but
the besieging force had mercilessly driven them back when they attempted
to gain the open country. Numbers, unwilling to accept a second time the
fatal hospitality of the city, preferred to remain in their exposed
situation, miserably dragging out a precarious existence by subsisting
upon snails, buds of trees and shrubs--even to the very grass of the
field.

[Sidenote: Sancerre capitulates.]

Happily for Sancerre, the political exigencies of the royal court insured
for the besieged Protestants, in the inevitable capitulation, more
favorable terms than they might otherwise have obtained. As early as the
eighteenth of July, Lery had been informed at a parley, by a former
acquaintance on the Roman Catholic side, that a general peace had been
concluded, and that Henry of Anjou had been elected to the throne of
Poland. This firs