The prostituted pack of clergymen, courtiers and warriors who surrounded the Very Christian King knew the trick how to inherit the property of heretics. To burn or massacre the reformers was to coin money for the royal pack, the sovereign having the right to transmit to the good Catholics the wealth confiscated from condemned heretics. But, to kill the heretics, to torture them, to burn them alive, that did not satisfy the pious monarch. Human thought was to be shackled. The sovereign proceeded with his allocution:
"It is notorious that the pestilence of heresy spreads in all directions with the aid of the printing press. My Chancellor shall now read a decree issued by me abolishing the printing press in my estates under pain of death."
The Chancellor, Cardinal Duprat, read in a loud voice the decree of that Father of Letters, as the court popinjays styled Francis I with egregious adulation:
"We, Francis I, by the grace of God, King of France.—It is our will, and we so order, and it pleases us to prohibit and forbid all printers in general, and of whatever rank and condition they may be, TO PRINT ANYTHING, UNDER PAIN OF HANGING.
"Such is our good pleasure.
FRANCIS."[44]
Come! One more effort; listen to the end of this tale, O, sons of Joel. My hand trembles as I trace these lines, my eyes are veiled in tears, my heart bleeds. But I must proceed with my story.
After the reading of the edict which prohibited the printing press in France under pain of death, the Criminal Lieutenant stepped forward to receive the orders of the Chancellor. He turned to the King, and the King commanded that the heretics be put to the torture and death without further delay. The gallant chat among the courtiers was hushed, and the eyes of the royal assembly turned towards the pyre.
The Franc-Taupin and Odelin stood in the midst of the Mathurins, close to the spot of execution. Not far from them were ranked the Cordeliers. Standing between Fra Girard and the Superior General of his Order, Hervé seemed to be the object of the dignitary's special solicitude. Both the sons of Christian Lebrenn were about to witness the execution. Their sister Hena, sentenced together with Ernest Rennepont to the flames as a relapsed and sacrilegious heretic, was to figure, along with her bridegroom, among the victims. The frightful spectacle passed before the eyes of Odelin like a vision of death. Without making a single motion, without experiencing a shiver, without dropping a tear, petrified with terror, the lad gazed—like him, who, a prey to some stupefying dream, remains motionless, stretched upon his bed. It was a horrible nightmare!
The order to proceed having gone from Francis I and been transmitted to the Mathurin monks, several of these proceeded to the portico of the Basilica of Notre Dame, whither the culprits had first been taken to make the amende honorable on their knees before the church. One of the patients had his tongue cut out for preferring charges against the Catholic clergy on his way from prison to the parvise.[45] The Mathurins led the victims in procession to the pyre. As they approached, all the religious Orders intoned in a sonorous voice the funeral psalmody—