And those were times in which it was necessary for a man to be careful, unless he had made up his mind to be burned.  For more than thirty years of Rondelet’s life the burning had gone on in his neighbourhood; intermittently it is true:  the spasms of superstitious fury being succeeded, one may charitably hope, by pity and remorse; but still the burnings had gone on.  The Benedictine monk of St. Maur, who writes the history of Languedoc, says, quite en passant, how someone was burnt at Toulouse in 1553, luckily only in effigy, for he had escaped to Geneva:  but he adds, “next year they burned several heretics,” it being not worth while to mention their names.  In 1556 they burned alive at Toulouse Jean Escalle, a poor Franciscan monk, who had found his order intolerable; while one Pierre de Lavaur, who dared preach Calvinism in the streets of Nismes, was hanged and burnt.  So had the score of judicial murders been increasing year by year, till it had to be, as all evil scores have to be in this world, paid off with interest, and paid off especially against the ignorant and fanatic monks who for a whole generation, in every university and school in France, had been howling down sound science, as well as sound religion; and at Montpellier in 1560-61, their debt was paid them in a very ugly way.  News came down to the hot southerners of Languedoc of the so-called conspiracy of Amboise.—­How the Duc de Guise and the Cardinal de Lorraine had butchered the best blood in France under the pretence of a treasonable plot; how the King of Navarre and the Prince de Conde had been arrested; then how Conde and Coligny were ready to take up arms at the head of all the Huguenots of France, and try to stop this life-long torturing, by sharp shot and cold steel; then how in six months’ time the king would assemble a general council to settle the question between Catholics and Huguenots.  The Huguenots, guessing how that would end, resolved to settle the question for themselves.  They rose in one city after another, sacked the churches, destroyed the images, put down by main force superstitious processions and dances; and did many things only to be excused by the exasperation caused by thirty years of cruelty.  At Montpellier there was hard fighting, murders—­so say the Catholic historians—­of priests and monks, sack of the new cathedral, destruction of the noble convents which lay in a ring round Montpellier.  The city and the university were in the hands of the Huguenots, and Montpellier became Protestant on the spot.

Next year came the counter-blow.  There were heavy battles with the Catholics all round the neighbourhood, destruction of the suburbs, threatened siege and sack, and years of misery and poverty for Montpellier and all who were therein.