to their merciless fellow-men.
The number of the victims of sword and fire is said to have reached two
hundred and eighty persons.[711]

[Sidenote: Montargis a safe refuge.]

[Sidenote: Flight of the refugees to Sancerre.]

The tragic end of the Huguenots at Orleans warned the Protestants of the
villages and open country of the dangers to which they were exposed. Many
fled with their wives and children to Montargis, where the aged Renee of
Ferrara was still living, the unwilling spectator of commotions which she
had foreseen and predicted, and which she had striven to prevent. Her
palace was still what Calvin had called it in the time of the first war,
"God's hostelry." Renee's royal descent, her connection by marriage with
the Guises--for Henry, the present duke, was her grandson--her well-known
aversion to civil war,[712] and, added to these, that demeanor which ever
betrayed a consciousness that she was a king's daughter, had thus far
protected her from direct insult, staunch and avowed Protestant as she
was, and had enabled her to extend to a host of fugitives for religion's
sake a hospitality which had not yet been invaded. But, the rancor
entertained by the two parties increasing in bitterness as the third
conflict advanced, it became more and more difficult to repress the
impatience felt by the fanatics of Paris to rid themselves of an asylum
for the adherents of the hated faith within so short a distance--about
seventy miles--of the orthodox capital. Montargis was narrowly watched.
Early in March the duchess was warned, in a letter, of pretended plans
formed by the refugees on her lands to succor their friends elsewhere in
the vicinity--the writer being no other than the adventurer Villegagnon,
the former vice-admiral, the betrayer of Coligny's Huguenot colony to
Brazil, who was now in the Roman Catholic service, under the Duke of
Anjou.[713] But the fresh flood of refugees to Montargis rendered further
forbearance impossible. The preachers stirred up the people, and the
people incited the king. Renee was told that she must dismiss the Huguenot
preachers, or submit to receiving a Roman Catholic garrison in her castle;
that the exercise of the Protestant religion could no longer be tolerated,
and the fugitives must find another home. The duchess could no longer
resist the superior forces of her enemies, and tearfully she provided the
miserable Huguenots for their journey with such wagons as she could find.
The