ce's true policy,
on the contrary, lay in decided action. His soldiers were inferior to none
in France. The flower of the higher nobility and the most substantial of
the middle classes had flocked to his standard so soon as it was unfurled.
But, without regular commissariat, and serving at their own costs, these
troops could not long maintain themselves in the field.[617] The nobles
and country gentlemen, never too provident in their habits, soon exhausted
their ready funds, with their crowd of hungry retainers, and became a more
pitiable class than even the burgesses. The latter, whom devotion to their
religious convictions, rather than any thirst for personal distinction,
had impelled to enter the service, could not remain many months away from
their workshops and counting-rooms without involving their families in
great pecuniary distress. It was not, however, possible for Conde and
Coligny to bring about a combat which the duke was resolved to decline,
and the unparalleled severity of the season suspended, at the same time,
their design of wresting from his hands the city of Saumur, a convenient
point of communication with northern France. Early in December the vines
were frozen in the fields,[618] disease broke out in either camp, and the
soldiers began to murmur at a war which seemed to be waged with the
elements rather than with their fellow-men. While Anjou's generals,
therefore, drew off their troops to Saumur, Chinon on the Vienne, and
Poitiers, Conde's army went into winter quarters a little farther west, at
Montreuil-Bellay, Loudun and Thouars, but afterward removed, for greater
commodity in obtaining provisions, to Partenay and Niort.[619]

[Sidenote: Huguenot reprisals and negotiations.]

It was while the Huguenots lay thus inactive that their leaders
deliberated respecting the best means of providing for their support
during the coming campaign. Jeanne d'Albret, whose masculine vigor[620]
had never been displayed more conspicuously than during this war, was
present, and assisted by her sage counsels. It was determined, in view of
the cruelties exercised upon the Protestants in those parts of the kingdom
where they had no strongholds, and of the confiscation of their property
by judicial decisions, to retaliate by selling the ecclesiastical
possessions in the cities that were now under Huguenot power, and applying
the proceeds to military uses. The order of sale was issued under the
names of the young Princ