[709]

Meanwhile the Huguenots had been more fortunate on the upper Loire, where
La Charite sustained a siege of four weeks by a force of seven thousand
Roman Catholics under Sansac. Its works were weak, its garrison small, but
every assault was bravely met. In the end the assailants, after severe
losses experienced from the enemy and from a destructive explosion of
their own magazine, abandoned their enterprise in a panic, on hearing an
ill-founded rumor of Coligny's approach.[710]

[Sidenote: Cruelties to the Huguenots in the prisons of Orleans.]

It was fortunate for the Protestants of the north and east that they
still had Sancerre and La Charite as asylums from the violence of their
enemies. Far from their armed companions, there was little protection for
their lives or their property. The edict of the preceding September,
assuring to peaceable Protestants freedom from molestation in their homes,
was as much a dead letter as any of its predecessors. The government, the
courts of justice, and the populace, were equally eager to oppress them.
At Orleans the "lieutenant-general" placed all the Huguenots of the city,
without distinction of age or sex, in the public prisons, upon pretext of
providing for the public security. A few days after (on the twenty-first
of August) the people, inflamed to fanaticism by seditious priests,
attacked these buildings. They succeeded in breaking into the first
prison, and every man, woman, and child was murdered. The door of the
second withstood all their attempts to gain admission. But the
bloodthirsty mob would not be balked of its prey. The whole neighborhood
was ransacked for wood and other combustible materials, and willing hands
kindled the fire. As the flames rose high above the doomed house, parents
who had lost all hope of saving their own lives sought to preserve the
lives of their infant children by throwing them to relatives or
acquaintances whom they recognized among their persecutors. But there are
times when the heart of man knows no pity. The laymen who had been taught
that heretics must be exterminated, even to the babe in the cradle, now
put into practice the savage lesson they had learned from their spiritual
instructors. Fathers and brothers took a cruel pleasure in receiving the
hapless infants on the point of their pikes, or in despatching them with
halberds, reserving the same fate for any of more mature age who might
venture to appeal from the devouring flames