Upper Languedoc had hitherto refused to take part in the rising, and the Prince of Conde was advancing on Toulouse when the Duke of Rohan attempted a bold enterprise against Montpellier.  He believed that he was sure of his communications with the interior of the town; but when the detachment of the advance-guard got a footing on the draw-bridge the ropes that held it were cut, and “the soldiers fell into a ditch, where they were shot down with arquebuses, at the same time that musketry played upon them from without.”  The lieutenant fell back in all haste upon the division of the Duke of Rohan, who retreated “to the best Villages between Montpellier and Lunel, without ever a man from Montpellier going out to follow and see whither he went.”  The war was wasting Languedoc, Viverais, and Rouergue; the Dukes of Montmorency and Ventadour, under the orders of the Prince of Conde, were pursuing the troops of Rohan in every direction; the burgesses of Montauban had declared for the Reformers, and were ravaging the lands of their Catholic neighbors in return for the frightful ruin everywhere caused by the royal troops.  The wretched peasantry laid the blame on the Duke of Rohan, “for one of the greatest misfortunes connected with the position of party-chiefs is this necessity they lie under of accounting for all their actions to the people, that is, to a monster composed of numberless heads, amongst which there is scarcely one open to reason.” [Memoires de Montmorency.] “Whoso has to do with a people that considers nothing difficult to undertake, and, as for the execution, makes no sort of provision, is apt to be much hampered,” writes the Duke of Rohan in his Memoires_ (t. i. p. 376).  It was this extreme embarrassment that landed him in crime.  One of his emissaries, returning from Piedmont, where he had been admitted to an interview with the ambassador of Spain, made overtures to him on behalf of that power “which had an interest, he said, in a prolongation of the hostilities in France, so as to be able to peaceably achieve its designs in Italy.  The great want of money in which the said duke then found himself, the country being unable to furnish more, and the towns being unwilling to do anything further, there being nothing to hope from England, and nothing but words without deeds having been obtained from the Duke of Savoy, absolutely constrained him to find some means of raising it in order to subsist.”  And so, in the following year, the Duke of Rohan treated with the King of Spain, who promised to allow him annually three hundred thousand ducats for the keep of his troops and forty thousand for himself.  In return the duke, who looked forward to “the time when he and his might make themselves sufficiently strong to canton themselves and form a separate state,” promised, in that state, freedom and enjoyment of their property to all Catholics.  A piece of strange and culpable blindness for which Rohan was to pay right dearly.