Petit mignon, mon petit Pierre,
Tu laisses ton corps à la terre,
Et ton âme s’en va dehors.”
La Pujade consecrated his pen to the Blessed Virgin in the Mariade, a poem of twelve cantos in praise of the très sainte et très sacrée Vierge Marie.
Another rhymer of Agen, and a courtier also, is Guillaume du Sable, a Huguenot, who in his verses held up his wife, his daughter, and his son-in-law as utterly given up to avarice. As for himself, he was always ready to spend! Yes, and as ready to beg. That he was by no means grasping, that his palms never itched, is shown by his poems, which are full of petitions to the king for horses, clothes, and appointments. Like so many of his co-religionists, he did not disdain the spoils of the enemy, as is apparent from this modest request to Henry IV.:
“Mais voulez-vous guérir, Sire, ma pauvreté?
Donnez-moi, s’il vous plait, la petite abbaye,
Ou quelque prieuré le reste de ma vie,
Puisque je l’ai vouée à votre majesté.”
He wrote against priests and monks, but stuck to the royal party, condemning all who revolted under pretext of religion. Perhaps the most supportable of his works is that against the Spanish Inquisition—a subject that never needs any sauce piquante. His Tragique Elégie du jour de Saint Barthélemy affords an additional proof in favor of the approximate number of one thousand victims at the deplorable massacre of August 24, 1572.