"The erection of the castle has thus been determined upon," said Parma, "and I am supposed to know nothing of the resolution." A little later he observed that they, were "working away most furiously at the citadel, and that within a month it would be stronger than it ever had been before." The building went on, indeed, with astonishing celerity, the fortress rising out of its ruins almost as rapidly, under the hands of the royalists, as it had been demolished, but a few years before, by the patriots.

The old foundations still remained, and blocks of houses, which had been constructed out of its ruins, were thrown down that the materials might be again employed in its restoration.
The citizens, impoverished and wretched, humbly demanded that the expense of building the citadel might be in part defrayed by the four hundred thousand florins in which they had been mulcted by the capitulation.

"I don't marvel at this," said Parma, "for certainly the poor city is most forlorn and poverty-stricken, the heretics having all left it." It was not long before it was very satisfactorily established, that the presence of those same heretics and liberty of conscience for all men, were indispensable conditions for the prosperity of the great capital.

Its downfall was instantaneous.

The merchants and industrious artisans all wandered away from the place which had been the seat of a world-wide traffic.