But these demonstrations, however cheering to the souls, had comparatively little effect upon the bodies of the sufferers.  It was impossible to walk through the streets of Paris without stumbling over the dead bodies of the citizens.  Trustworthy eye-witnesses of those dreadful days have placed the number of the dead during the summer at thirty thousand.  A tumultuous assemblage of the starving and the forlorn rushed at last to the municipal palace, demanding peace or bread.  The rebels were soon dispersed however by a charge, headed by the Chevalier d’Aumale, and assisted by the chiefs of the wards, and so soon as the riot was quelled, its ringleader, a leading advocate, Renaud by name, was hanged.

Still, but for the energy of the priests, it is doubtful whether the city could have been held by the Confederacy.  The Duke of Nemours confessed that there were occasions when they never would have been able to sustain a determined onslaught, and they were daily expecting to see the Prince of Bearne battering triumphantly at their gates.

But the eloquence of the preachers, especially of the one-eyed father Boucher, sustained the fainting spirits of the people, and consoled the sufferers in their dying agonies by glimpses of paradise.  Sublime was that devotion, superhuman that craft; but it is only by weapons from the armoury of the Unseen that human creatures can long confront such horrors in a wicked cause.  Superstition, in those days at least, was a political force absolutely without limitation, and most adroitly did the agents of Spain and Rome handle its tremendous enginery against unhappy France.  For the hideous details of the most dreadful sieges recorded in ancient or modern times were now reproduced in Paris.  Not a revolutionary circumstance, at which the world had shuddered in the accounts of the siege of Jerusalem, was spared.  Men devoured such dead vermin as could be found lying in the streets.  They crowded greedily around stalls in the public squares where the skin, bones, and offal of such dogs, cats and unclean beasts as still remained for the consumption of the wealthier classes were sold to the populace.  Over the doorways of these flesh markets might be read “Haec runt munera pro iis qui vitam pro Philippo profuderunt.”  Men stood in archways and narrow passages lying in wait for whatever stray dogs still remained at large, noosed them, strangled them, and like savage beasts of prey tore them to pieces and devoured them alive.  And it sometimes happened, too, that the equally hungry dog proved the more successful in the foul encounter, and fed upon the man.  A lady visiting the Duchess of Nemours—­called for the high pretensions of her sons by her two marriages the queen-mother—­complained bitterly that mothers in Paris had been compelled to kill their own children outright to save them from starving to death in lingering agony.  “And if you are brought to that extremity,” replied the duchess, “as for the sake of our holy religion