[Sidenote: Inhabitants of Mérindol cited.]
The slow methods heretofore pursued having proved abortive, in 1540 the parliament summoned to its bar, as suspected of heresy, fifteen or twenty[465] of the inhabitants of the village of Mérindol. On the appointed day the accused made their way to Aix, but, on stopping to obtain legal advice of a lawyer more candid than others to whom they had first applied, and who had declined to give counsel to reputed Lutherans, they were warned by no means to appear, as their death was already resolved upon. They acted on the friendly injunction, and fled while it was still time.
[Sidenote: The atrocious Arrêt de Mérindol, Nov. 18, 1540.]
Finding itself balked for the time of its expected prey, the parliament resolved to avenge the slight put upon its authority, by compassing the ruin of a larger number of victims. On the eighteenth of November, 1540, the order was given which has since become infamous under the designation of the "_Arrêt de Mérindol_." The persons who had failed to obey the summons were sentenced to be burned alive, as heretics and guilty of treason against God and the King. If not apprehended in person, they were to be burned in effigy, their wives and children proscribed, and their possessions confiscated. As if this were not enough to satisfy the most inordinate greed of vengeance, parliament ordered _that all the houses of Mérindol be burned and razed to the ground, and the trees cut down for a distance of two hundred paces on every side, in order that the spot which had been the receptacle of heresy might be forever uninhabited_! Finally, with an affectation which would seem puerile were it not the conclusion of so sanguinary a document, the owners of lands were forbidden to lease any part of Mérindol to a tenant bearing the same name, or belonging to the same family, as the miscreants against whom the decree was fulminated.[466]
[Sidenote: It is condemned by public opinion.]
A more atrocious sentence was, perhaps, never rendered by a court of justice than the _Arrêt de Mérindol_, which condemned the accused without a hearing, confounded the innocent with the guilty, and consigned the entire population of a peaceful village, by a single stroke of the pen, to a cruel death, or a scarcely less terrible exile. For ten righteous persons God would have spared guilty Sodom; but neither the virtues of the inoffensive inhabitants, nor the presence of many Roman Catholics among them, could insure the safety of the ill-fated Mérindol at the hands of merciless judges.[467] The publication of the _Arrêt_ occasioned, even within the bounds of the province, the most severe animadversion; nor were there wanting men of learning and high social position, who, while commenting freely upon the scandalous morals of the clergy, expressed their conviction that the public welfare would be promoted rather by restraining and reforming the profligacy of the ecclesiastics, than by issuing bloody edicts against the most exemplary part of the community.[468]