from the Protestant burying-grounds, and thrown into the rivers; and Protestant clergymen were imprisoned or banished on the slightest pretext. The death of Colbert, in 1683, removed the last obstacle to the progress of these severities. Two millions of people were virtually put beyond the pale of the laws-denied liberty of conscience at home, and yet prohibited, on pain of death, from going into exile. The crowning act of persecution was the employment of the famous dragonnades, or invasions of the Protestant provinces by troops of dragoons, charged with the task of forcing the conversion of the inhabitants to the Catholic faith. The following is the account of these dragonnades, given by a French historian; and our readers will doubtless be struck by the similarity of many of the scenes described, to those which were enacted in Scotland by the dragoons of Charles II. at the time of the persecution:-" Louvois did not venture at once upon a general dragonnade. He commenced by isolated and progressive attempts, as if to habituate himself, the king, and the country to such measures. Encouraged by the success which he obtained over the peasants of Navarre, he caused the frontiers of the kingdom to be closed, and, putting his troops in motion, commenced a general dragonnade. From Bearn, the cradle of French Calvinism, the dragonnade advanced roaring towards the valley of the Garonne, and ascended its tributaries the Dordogne, the Lot, the Tarn, the canal of Languedoc, towards the Cevennes. All kinds of troops were employed in this service; but the dragoons-whether from their more brutal zeal, or their more glaring uniform-obtained the honour of giving it its name. The day before their arrival, the civil and ecclesiastical authorities of the town or village assembled the Protestant inhabitants, and in a harangue, the usual peroration of which was a threatening announcement of the armed force which was at hand, signified to them the irrevocable resolution of the king. The terrified people were sometimes converted by unanimous acclamations. Educated persons signed a confession of faith; the mob simply said, 'I conform,' or cried out 'Ave Maria,' or made the sign of the cross. In some towns conversion offices were established, where, after the names of the converts were inscribed, there was delivered to them, on the back of a playing-card, a certificate which was to protect them from the soldiery. The people of Nismes called this card the mark of the beast-the expression of a profound truth; for what else is a man who, to preserve his animal and mortal being, abdicates his thought, his soul, his celestial and immortal nature?

"The soldiers then entered the village with drawn sabres and muskets erect. Their first attempt was to stagger the fidelity of the clergyman; if he resisted, he was driven from the town, that his example might not restrain the flock. After him, they tried to seduce the notables of the place. At Montauban, the Bishop Nesmond called before the intendant, De Boufflers, the

Barons Mauzac, Vicoze, Montbeton, &c. The lacqueys, concealed behind the door, suddenly fell upon the noblemen, and threw them down, so as to make them kneel; and while they were struggling with the valets, the prelate made the sign of the cross upon them, and the business was over. Meanwhile the citizens and common people were the prey of a licentious soldiery, whose excesses would have put to the blush a horde of Tartars. After locking up their victims in closets, the dragoons threw out the magnificent furniture into the street, stalled their horses in splendid halls, offered them buckets of milk and wine to drink, and for litter gave them wool, cotton, silk, and the finest Holland lace. If their host, or rather their victim, still held out, they dragged him from his confinement, and sometimes suspended him in a well; sometimes tying his hands and feet crosswise at his back, hoisted him up by a pulley, with his face down, like a chandelier, let him fall on his face, and then hauled him up to let him fall again; sometimes stripping him entirely naked, they forced him to turn the spit, and, while he was cooking their repast, amused themselves with pinching his skin and scorching his hair; sometimes they compelled him to hold in his clenched hand a burning coal during the repetition of a whole paternoster. But the most intolerable punishment was the deprivation of sleep. Sometimes they sold sleep to their victim at ten, twenty, or thirty crowns an hour. By the time that the poor wretch began to slumber, the fatal hour struck, and they awoke him with their drums. Many women, seized in their flight by the pains of childbirth, were delivered in the woods. Their sex, in general, had more to suffer than ours; because to a nature more delicate and modest, they joined a more lively faith and greater constancy. Young mothers, tied to the posts of their beds, were offered the cruel alternative of abjuring, or seeing their infants die of hunger before their eyes. Some yielded, that they might give their babes suck-touching feebleness of a mother, sacrificing, as she conceived, her own eternal salvation to the daily wants of her child, trusting in the infinite mercy of God, alone capable of understanding and rewarding the act.

"From Versailles, Louvois watched, directed, stimulated the dragonnade, and scolded the less active intendants as the proprietor of a farm scolds his lazy reapers. 'His majesty,' he wrote to them,' wishes you to push to the last extremity those who will have the stupid glory of being the last to give up their religion.'

These severities had in some degree the effect intended. Whole towns and districts professed their conversion to the Catholic faith. The prisons and dungeons were full of recusants, who

* Histoire des Pasteurs du Désert. By M. Peyrat. An able work, to which we are indebted for much of the information contained in the present tract.

were treated with the most barbarous cruelty. Seven hundred Protestant churches were suppressed throughout France, and the clergymen separated from their flocks and driven into exile. Louis had no doubt but that the last remains of Huguenotism would soon be destroyed in his kingdom-that he would soon reign over a population united in one faith. Already he was receiving the flatteries and praises of his courtiers for the success of his schemes; already he was hailed by the Jesuits as the destroyer of heresy. One measure alone remained to be adopted to make his triumph complete; namely, the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The previous persecutions, the edicts against the Protestants during the last twenty years, and the dragonnades, had been merely preliminary to this final stroke, which descended, in the shape of a royal ordonnance, in the month of October 1685. By this ordonnance all assemblies of any kind for the exercise of Protestant worship were prohibited; and all the Protestant clergy who should continue obstinate in their opinions were ordered to quit France within fifteen days, under the penalty of being sent to the galleys. The only part of France to which these regulations did not apply was Alsace, which was under the protection of a special treaty.

Fifteen hundred clergymen left the country. Most of them took refuge in Holland and Germany. The people, unable to bear separation from their pastors, followed them into exile; and immediately after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the emigration, which had been going on for twenty years, increased to such a degree as to attract the attention of government. The emigrants were forced to adopt innumerable precautions, and to run innumerable risks, in order to effect their escape. Travelling in all manner of disguises, and by the most unfrequented routes, they endeavoured to reach the frontier, or some seaport where they might embark for a foreign land. "Great ladies, whose satin slippers had never before touched the grass, now travelled thirty, forty, or fifty leagues in clogs behind the mule of their guide, whose wife or daughter they passed for. Gentlemen tried to pass rolling wheelbarrows, carrying bales, or driving an ass or pigs; others adopted the costume of a sportsman, with a gun and dog; others that of a pilgrim, with long beard, staff, and rosary in hand, and their breast ornamented with shells." Within a quarter of a century, about 500,000 Protestants had quitted France, and dispersed themselves over the whole world. As far as India and America French refugees might be found. In the backwoods of America the savage Indians received, with kindness and respect, the white strangers, "who were without a home, because they had worshipped the Great Spirit." The northern states of Europe, however, were the principal resort of the emigrants. Everywhere they were welcomed; subscriptions were made for their relief, lands appropriated to them, and residences provided for them.

Thus were many little French colonies planted in various of the northern countries of Europe in the end of the seventeenth century. In London, Berlin, and Amsterdam, whole streets were occupied by emigrant French Protestants. Nor was the hospitality with which they were treated without a recompense. Wherever they went, they carried with them new branches of manufacture which France had hitherto monopolised; and many establishments for stocking-making, silk-dyeing, glass-blowing, &c.-now flourishing in the towns of northern Europe, were founded by the refugees whom the revocation of the Edict of Nantes drove from their homes. Among the expelled clergymen, too, were many men of ability and learning, who founded academies, or pursued a literary career in the countries where they took refuge.

PERSECUTIONS IN LANGUEDOC AND DAUPHINY-THE FIRST

PASTORS OF THE DESERT.

France was by no means cleared of Protestantism by the severities of Louis and his ministers. The half million who had gone into exile were but a fraction of the Protestant population, and the leaven still remained, fermenting throughout all the provinces of France. True, whole towns and districts had abjured their faith, and professed themselves Catholics-driven to this extremity by the terrors of the dragonnade. It might indeed have appeared at first sight that Louis, in thundering his royal decree over the kingdom, had performed a miracle-had put down Protestantism at once and for ever. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes was followed by a stifling calm; and if any Protestants continued in France, they scarcely dared to breathe. But a tremendous reaction ensued. The pretended converts to Catholicism were seized with the horrors of remorse. Many of them, when partaking of the sacrament for the first time according to the Romish form, spat out the wafer, or went into fits. Others continued Catholics for a time; but when attacked by illness, or when death approached, they returned to their former faith, testifying all the agonies of a restless conscience. In a short time it became evident that Protestantism was far from being extinct in France. As in Scotland after the passing of the act of conformity, meetings for worship began to be held, at first in private houses and secretly, afterwards in the fields and more openly. Protestant clergymen, both Frenchmen and foreignerseither such as had never gone into exile, or such as had been induced to return by a noble and chivalrous sense of duty-went about through the country preaching and administering the ordinances of religion according to the Protestant form. All the exertions of the authorities, military and civil, to put down these conventicles were of no avail.

The stronghold of French Protestantism was the Cevennes -the name given to an irregular tract of very mountainous

country, extending from the Pyrenees to the Alps, a distance of about three hundred miles. Of this extensive district, however, the part which is principally famed as having been the scene of the war of the Camisards, is that which constituted formerly the eastern half of the province of Languedoc, and which, according to the present system of geographical division, would include the four departments of Ardèche, Lozère, Gard, and Hérault. The population of this part of France may have amounted, at the date of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, to about 300,000, of whom nearly one-half were Protestants. In the natives of Lower Languedoc might be discerned traces of Oriental blood, derived from the Jews and Arabs who haunted the shores of the Gulf of

Lyons during the middle ages. The Cévenols of the north, again, were a brave, simple, and hardy mountain race, and almost to a man Protestant. Their occupations were partly agricultural and pastoral, partly manufacturing. Rye, and chestnuts boiled in milk, were their principal fare. In the summer they fed cattle; in the winter, when the snow lay on the hills, they remained in their houses, weaving coarse serges, for which they found a market at the town of Mende.

The fastnesses of the Cevennes afforded a refuge for the persecuted Protestants of the neighbouring provinces. During the dragonnade in Languedoc, many of the Huguenots fled to these mountains to escape the fury of the soldiery; in fact all the enthusiastic Protestantism of Languedoc was here cooped up and concentrated. The nature of the country-a maze of mountains, rocks, and forests, in many places savage and rugged in the extreme-defied all the attempts which were made to submit it to the process of purgation which the rest of France, and especially Languedoc, had experienced.

About the time of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, a new intendant or governor was appointed to the province of Languedoc. This was Nicolas de Lamoignon de Bâville, Count de Launai-Courson. Bâville was born at Paris in 1648, and belonged to a family of jurists, whose spirit of antipathy to the church and the nobility he inherited. Able, active, and indefatigable, ambitious and imperious, he was a devoted disciple of Richelieu, in as far as anxiety to strengthen the royal power at the expense of the other interests in the state was concerned. Desirous of being absolute in his province, he procured the appointment of his brother-in-law, the Count de Broglie, to the office of military commandant of the province under himBroglie being a savage soldier, and a man of too little ability to become his rival.

Like the curates so famous in the history of the Scottish persecution under Charles II., the new clergy appointed to succeed the exiled Protestant pastors of France were men little calculated to recommend the religion of which they were the representatives. This had the effect of increasing the fondness of the Cévenols