Every
movement was suspicious. A Roman Catholic chronicler, who has preserved in
his voluminous diary many of the details that enable us to restore
something of its original coloring to the picture of the social and
political condition of the times, vividly portrays the misfortunes of the
unfortunate Huguenots of Provins. They were not numerous. One by one,
thirty or forty had stealthily crept into town, experiencing no other
injury than the coarse raillery of their former neighbors. Thereupon the
municipal government met and deliberated upon the measures of police to be
taken "in order to hold the Huguenots in check and in fear, and to avoid
any treachery they might intend to put into practice by the introduction
of their brother Huguenots into the city to plunder and hold it by force."
The determination arrived at was that each of the four captains should
visit the Huguenot houses of his quarter, examine the inmates, and take
all the weapons he found, giving a receipt to their owners. This was not
the only humiliation to which the Protestants were subjected. A
proclamation was published forbidding them from receiving any person into
their houses, from meeting together under any pretext, from leaving their
houses in the evening after seven o'clock in summer, or five in winter,
from walking by day or night on the walls, or, indeed, from approaching
within two arquebuse shots' distance of them--all upon pain of death! They
could not even go into the country without a passport from the bailiff and
the captain of the gate, the penalty of transgressing this regulation
being banishment. No wonder that the Huguenots were irritated, and that
most of them wished that they had not returned.[522] Since, however, a
royal ordinance of the nineteenth of May expressly enjoined upon all
fugitive Huguenots to re-enter the cities to which they belonged, and in
case of refusal commanded the magistrates to raise a force and attack them
as presumptive robbers and enemies of the public peace,[523] they were
perhaps quite as safe within the walls as roaming about outside of them.

[Sidenote: Expedition and fate of De Cocqueville.]

Early in the summer an event occurred on the northern frontier, which,
although in itself of little weight, augmented the suspicions which the
Protestants began to entertain of the Spanish tendencies of the
government. One Seigneur de Cocqueville, with a party of French and
Flemish Huguenots, had crossed the nort