This exultation never deserted these courageous enthusiasts. They
received their condemnation to death "as if it had been an invitation to
a marriage feast." They encouraged the friends who crowded their path to
the scaffold with exhortations to remain true in the Reformed faith. La
Grange, standing upon the ladder, proclaimed with a loud voice, that he
was slain for having preached the pure word of God to a Christian people
in a Christian land. De Bray, under the same gibbet; testified stoutly
that he, too, had committed that offence alone. He warned his friends to
obey the magistrates, and all others in authority, except in matters of
conscience; to abstain from sedition; but to obey the will of God. The
executioner threw him from the ladder while he was yet speaking. So
ended the lives of two eloquent, learned, and highly-gifted divines.

Many hundreds of victims were sacrificed in the unfortunate city.
"There were a great many other citizens strangled or beheaded," says an
aristocratic Catholic historian of the time, "but they were mostly
personages of little quality, whose names are quite unknown to me."--
[Pontus Payen]--The franchises of the city were all revoked. There was a
prodigious amount of property confiscated to the benefit of Noircarmes
and the rest of the "Seven Sleepers." Many Calvinists were burned,
others were hanged. "For--two whole years," says another Catholic, who
was a citizen of Valenciennes at the time, "there was, scarcely a week in
which several citizens were not executed and often a great number were
despatched at a time. All this gave so much alarm to the good and
innocent, that many quitted the city as fast as they could." If the good
and innocent happened to be rich, they might be sure that Noircarmes
would deem that a crime for which no goodness and innocence could atone.

Upon the fate of Valenciennes had depended, as if by common agreement,