term, for I believe that by the end of the month all will be settled.  I
will not, however, omit to tell you that all we have done in these
conversions will be nothing but useless, if the king do not oblige the
bishops to send good priests to instruct the people who want to hear the
gospel preached. But I fear that the king will be worse obeyed in that
respect by the priests than by the religionists.  I do not tell you this
without grounds."  "There is not a courier who does not bring the king
great causes for joy," writes Madame de Maintenon, "that is to say,
conversions by thousands.  I can quite believe that all these
conversions are not sincere, but God makes use of all ways of bringing
back heretics.  Their children, at any rate, will be Catholics; their
outward reunion places them within reach of the truth; pray God to
enlighten them all; there is nothing the king has more at heart."

In the month of August, 1684, she said, "The king has a design of
laboring for the entire conversion of the heretics.  He often has
conferences about it with M. Le Tellier and M. de Chateauneuf, whereat
I was given to understand that I should not be one too many.  M. de
Chateauneuf proposed measures which are not expedient.  There must be no
precipitation; it must be conversion, not persecution.  M. de Louvois was
for gentleness, which is not in accordance with his nature and his
eagerness to see matters ended.  The king is ready to do what is thought
most likely to conduce to the good of religion.  Such an achievement will
cover him with glory before God and before men.  He will have brought
back all his subjects into the bosom of the church, and will have
destroyed the heresy which his predecessors could not vanquish."

The king's glory was about to be complete; the _gentleness_ of Louvois
had prevailed; he had found himself obliged to moderate the zeal of his
superintendents; "nothing remained but to weed out the religionists of
the small towns and villages;" by stretching a point the process had been
carried into the principality of Orange, which still belonged to the
house of Nassau, on the pretext that the people of that district had
received in their chapels the king's subjects.  The Count of Tesse, who
had charge of the expedition, wrote to Louvois, "Not only, on one and the
same day, did the whole town of Orange become converted, but the state
took the same resolution, and the members of the Parliament, who were
minded to distinguish themselves by a little more stubbornness, adopted
the same course twenty-four hours afterwards.  All this was done gently,
without violence or disorder.  There is only a parson named Chambrun,
patriarch of the district, who persists in refusing to listen to reason;
for the president, who did aspire to the honor of martyrdom, would, as
well as the rest of the Parliament, have turned Mohammedan, if I had
desired it.  You would not believe how infatuated all these people were,
and are still, about the Prince of Orange, his authority, Holland,
England, and the Protestants of Germany.  I should never end if I were to
recount all the foolish and impertinent proposals they have made to me."
M. de Tesse did not tell Louvois that he was obliged to have the pastors
of Orange seized and carried off.  They were kept twelve years in prison
at Pierre-Encise; none but M. de Chambrun, who had been taken to Valence,
managed to escape and take refuge in Holland, bemoaning to the end of his
days a moment's weakness.  "I was quite exhausted by torture, and I let
fall this unhappy expression: 'Very well, then, I will be reconciled.'
This sin has brought me down as it were into hell itself, and I have
looked upon myself as a dastardly soldier who turned his back on the day
of battle, and as an unfaithful servant who betrayed the interests of his
master."

The king assembled his council.  The lists of converts were so long that
there could scarcely remain in the kingdom more than a few thousand
recalcitrants.  "His Majesty proposed to take an ultimate resolution as
regarded the Edict of Nantes," writes the Duke of Burgundy in a
memorandum found amongst his papers.  "Monseigneur represented that,
according to an anonymous letter he had received the day before, the
Huguenots had some expectation of what was coming upon them, that there
was perhaps some reason to fear that they would take up arms, relying
upon the protection of the princes of their religion, and that, supposing
they dared not do so, a great number would leave the kingdom, which would
be injurious to commerce and agriculture, and, for that same reason,
would weaken the state.  The king replied that he had foreseen all for
some time past, and had provided for all; that nothing in the world would
be more painful to him than to shed a single drop of the blood of his
subjects, but that he had armies and good generals whom he would employ
in case of need against rebels who courted their own destruction.  As for
calculations of interest, he thought them worthy of but little
consideration in comparison with the advantages of a measure which would
restore to religion its splendor, to the state its tranquillity, and to
authority all its rights.  A resolution was carried unanimously for the
suppression of the Edict of Nantes."  The declaration, drawn up by
Chancellor Le Tellier and Chateauneuf, was signed by the king on the 15th
of October, 1685; it was despatched on the 17th to all the
superintendents.  The edict of pacification, that great work of the
liberal and prudent genius of Henry IV., respected and confirmed in its
most important particulars by Cardinal Richelieu, recognized over and
over again by Louis XIV. himself, disappeared at a single stroke,
carrying with it all hope of liberty, repose, and justice, for fifteen
hundred thousand subjects of the king.  "Our pains," said the preamble of
the edict, "have had the end we had proposed, seeing that the better and
the greater part of our subjects of the religion styled Reformed have
embraced the Catholic.  The execution of the Edict of Nantes consequently
remaining useless, we have considered that we could not do better, for
the purpose of effacing entirely the memory of the evils which this false
religion has caused in our kingdom, than revoke entirely the aforesaid
Edict of Nantes, and all that has been done in favor of the said
religion."

[Illustration: Revocation of the Edict of Nantes----556]

The edict of October 15, 1685, supposed the religion styled Reformed to
be already destroyed and abolished.  It ordered the demolition of all the
chapels that remained standing, and interdicted any assembly or worship;
recalcitrant (_opiniatres_) ministers were ordered to leave the kingdom
within fifteen days; the schools were closed; all new-born babies were to
be baptized by the parish priests; religionists were forbidden to leave
the kingdom on pain of the galleys for the men and confiscation of person
and property for the women.  "The will of the king," said superintendent
Marillac at Rouen, "is, that there be no more than one religion in this
kingdom; it is for the glory of God and the well-being of the state."
Two hours were allowed the Reformers of Rouen for making their
abjuration.

One clause, at the end of the edict of October 15, seemed to extenuate
its effect.  "Those of our subjects of the religion styled Reformed who
shall persist in their errors, pending the time when it may please God to
enlighten them like the rest, shall be allowed to remain in the kingdom,
country, and lands, which obey the king, there to continue their trade
and enjoy their property without being liable to be vexed or hindered on
pretext of prayer or worship of the said religion of whatsoever nature
they may be."  "Never was there illusion more cruel than that which this
clause caused people," says Benoit, in his _Histoire de l'Edit de
Nantes_."  It was believed that the king meant only to forbid special
exercises, but that he intended to leave conscience free, since he
granted this grace to all those who were still Reformers, pending the
time when it should please God to enlighten them.  Many gave up the
measures they had taken for leaving the country with their families, many
voluntarily returned from the retreats where they had hitherto been
fortunate enough to lie hid.  The most mistrustful dared not suppose that
so solemn a promise was only made to be broken on the morrow.  They were
all, nevertheless, mistaken; and those who were imprudent enough to
return to their homes were only just in time to receive the dragoons
there."  A letter from Louvois to the Duke of Noailles put a stop to all
illusion.  "I have no doubt," he wrote, "that some rather heavy billets
upon the few amongst the nobility and third estate still remaining of the
religionists will undeceive them as to the mistake they are under about
the edict M. de Chateauneuf drew up for us.  His Majesty desires that you
should explain yourself very sternly, and that extreme severity should be
employed against those who are not willing to become of his religion;
those who have the silly vanity to glory in holding out to the last must
be driven to extremity."  The pride of Louis XIV. was engaged in the
struggle; those of his subjects who refused to sacrifice their religion
to him were disobedient, rebellious, and besotted with silly vanity.
"It will be quite ridiculous before long to be of that religion," wrote
Madame de Maintenon.

Even in his court and amongst his most useful servants the king
encountered unexpected opposition.  Marshal Schomberg with great
difficulty obtained authority to leave the kingdom; Duquesne was refused.
The illustrious old man, whom the Algerian corsairs called "the old
French capitan, whose bride is the sea, and whom the angel of death has
forgotten," received permission to reside in France without being
troubled about his religion.  "For sixty years I have rendered to Caesar
that which was Caesar's," said the sailor proudly; "it is time to render
unto God that which is God's."  And, when the king regretted that his
religion prevented him from properly recognizing his glorious career,
"Sir," said Duquesne, "I am a Protestant, but I always thought that my
services were Catholic."  Duquesne's children went abroad.  When he died,
1688, his body was refused to them.  His sons raised a monument to him at
Aubonne, in the canton of Berne, with this inscription: "This tomb awaits
the remains of Duquesne.  Passer, should you ask why the Hollanders have
raised a superb monument to Ruyter vanquished, and why the French have
refused a tomb to Ruyter's vanquisher, the fear and respect inspired by a
monarch whose power extends afar do not allow me to answer."

Of the rest, only the Marquis of Ruvigny and the Princess of Tarento,
daughter-in-law of the Duke of La Tremoille and issue of the house of
Hesse, obtained authority to leave France.  All ports were closed, all
frontiers watched.  The great lords gave way, one after another.
Accustomed to enjoy royal favors, attaching to them excessive value,
living at court, close to Paris, which was spared a great deal during the
persecution, they, without much effort, renounced a faith which closed to
them henceforth the door to all offices and all honors.  The gentlemen of
the provinces were more resolute; many realized as much as they could of
their property, and went abroad, braving all dangers, even that of the
galleys in case of arrest.  The Duke of La Force had abjured, then
repented of his abjuration, only to relapse again.  One of his cousins,
seventy-five years of age, was taken to the galleys.  He had for his
companion Louis de Marolles, late king's councillor.  "I live just now
all alone," wrote the latter to his wife.  "My meals are brought from
outside; if you saw me in my beautiful convict-dress, you would be
charmed.  The iron I wear on my leg, though it weighs only three pounds,
inconvenienced me at first far more than that which you saw me in at La
Tournelle."  Files of Protestant galley-convicts were halted in the
towns, in the hope of inspiring the obstinate with a salutary terror.

The error which had been fallen into, however, was perceived at court.
The stand made by Protestants astounded the superintendents as well as
Louvois himself.  Everywhere men said, as they said at Dieppe, "We will
not change our religion for anybody; the king has power over our persons
and our property, but he has no power over our consciences."  There was
fleeing in all directions.  The governors grew weary of watching the
coasts and the frontiers.  "The way to make only a few go," said Louvois,
"is to leave them liberty to do so without letting them know it."  Any
way was good enough to escape from such oppression.  "Two days ago,"
wrote M. de Tesse, who commanded at Grenoble, "a woman, to get safe away,
hit upon an invention which deserves to be known.  She made a bargain
with a Savoyard, an ironmonger, and had herself packed up in a load of
iron rods, the ends of which showed.  It was carried to the custom-house,
and the tradesman paid on the weight of the iron, which was weighed
together with the woman, who was not unpacked until she was six leagues
from the frontier."  "For a long time," says M. Floquet, "there was talk
in Normandy of the Count of Marance, who, in the middle of a severe
winter, flying with thirty-nine others on board a fishing-smack,
encountered a tempest, and remained a long time at sea without
provisions, dying of hunger, he, the countess, and all the passengers,
amongst whom were pregnant women, mothers with infants at the breast,
without resources of any sort, reduced for lack of everything to a little
melted snow, with which they moistened the parched lips of the dying
babes."  It were impossible to estimate precisely the number of
emigrations; it was probably between three and four hundred thousand.
"To speak only of our own province," writes M. Floquet in his _Histoire
du Parlement de Normandie,_ "about one hundred and eighty-four thousand
religionists went away; more than twenty-six thousand habitations were
deserted; in Rouen there were counted no more than sixty thousand men
instead of the eighty thousand that were to be seen there a few years
before.  Almost all trade was stopped there as well as in the rest of
Normandy.  The little amount of manufacture that was possible rotted away
on the spot for want of transport to foreign countries, whence vessels
were no longer found to come.  Rouen, Darnetal, Elbeuf, Louviers,
Caudebec, Le Havre, Pont-Audemer, Caen,  St. Lo, Alencon, and Bayeux were
falling into decay, the different branches of trade and industry which
had but lately been seen flourishing there having perished through the
emigration of the masters whom their skilled workmen followed in shoals."
The Norman emigration had been very numerous, thanks to the extent of its
coasts and to the habitual communication between Normandy, England, and
Holland; Vauban, however, remained very far from the truth when he
deplored, in 1688, "the desertion of one hundred thousand men, the
withdrawal from the kingdom of sixty millions of livres, the enemy's
fleets swelled by nine thousand sailors, the best in the kingdom, and the
enemy's armies by six hundred officers and twelve thousand soldiers, who
had seen service."  It is a natural but a striking fact that the
Reformers who left France and were received with open arms in
Brandenburg, Holland, England, and Switzerland carried in their hearts a
profound hatred for the king who drove them away from their country, and
everywhere took service against him, whilst the Protestants who remained
in France, bound to the soil by a thousand indissoluble ties, continued
at the same time to be submissive and faithful.  "It is right," said
Chanlay, in a Memoire addressed to the king, "whilst we condemn the
conduct of the new converts, fugitives, who have borne arms against
France since the commencement of this war up to the present, it is right,
say I, to give those who have staid in France the praise and credit they
deserve.  Indeed, if we except a few disturbances of little consequence
which have taken place in Languedoc, we have, besides the fact of their
remaining faithful to the king in the provinces, and especially in
Dauphiny, even whilst the confederated armies of the emperor, of Spain,
and of the Duke of Savoy were in the heart of that province in greater
strength than the forces of the king, to note that those who were fit to
bear arms have enlisted amongst the troops of his Majesty and done good
service."  In 1745, after sixty years' persecution, consequent upon the
revocation of the Edict of Nantes, Matthew Desubas, a young pastor
accused before the superintendent of Languedoc, Lenain, said with
high-spirited modesty, "The ministers preach nothing but patience and
fidelity to the king."  I am aware of it, sir," answered the
superintendent.  The pastors were hanged or burned, the faithful flock
dragged to the galleys and the Tower of Constance.  Prayers for the
king, nevertheless, were sent up from the proscribed assemblies in the
desert, whilst the pulpit of Saurin at the Hague resounded with his
anathemas against Louis XIV., and the regiments of emigrant Huguenots
were marching against the king's troops under the flags of England or
Holland.

The peace of Ryswick had not brought the Protestants the hoped-for
alleviation of their woes.  Louis XIV. haughtily rejected the petition of
the English and Dutch plenipotentiaries on behalf of "those in affliction
who ought to have their share in the happiness of Europe."  The
persecution everywhere continued,--with determination and legality in the
north, with violence and passion in the south, abandoned to the tyranny
of M. de Lamoignon de Baville, a crafty and cold-bloodedly cruel
politician, without the excuse of any zealous religious conviction.  The
execution of several ministers who had remained in hiding in the
Cevennes, or had returned from exile to instruct and comfort their
flocks, raised to the highest pitch the enthusiasm of the Reformers of
Languedoc.  Deprived of their highly-prized assemblies and of their
pastors' guidance, men and women, graybeards and children, all at once
fancied themselves animated by the spirit of prophecy.  Young girls had
celestial visions; the little peasant lasses poured out their utterances
in French, sometimes in the language and with the sublime eloquence of
the Bible, sole source of their religious knowledge.  The rumor of these
marvels ran from village to village; meetings were held to hear the
inspired maidens, in contempt of edicts, the galleys, and the stake.  A
gentleman glass-worker, named Abraham de la Serre, was, as it were, the
Samuel of this new school of prophets.  In vain did M. de Baville have
three hundred children imprisoned at Uzes, and then send them to the
galleys; the religious contagion was too strong for the punishments.
"Women found themselves in a single day husbandless, childless,
houseless, and penniless," says Court; they remained immovable in their
pious ecstasy; the assemblies multiplied; the troops which had so long
occupied Languedoc had been summoned away by the war of succession in
Spain; the militia could no longer restrain the Reformers growing every
day more enthusiastic through the prophetic hopes which were born of
their long sufferings.  The arch-priest of the Cevennes, Abbe du Chayla,
a tyrannical and cruel man, had undertaken a mission at the head of the
Capuchins.  His house was crammed with condemned Protestants; the breath
of revolt passed over the mountains on the night of July 27, 1702, the
castle of the arch-priest was surrounded by Huguenots in arms, who
demanded the surrender of the prisoners.  Du Chayla refused.  The gates
were forced, the condemned released, the priests who happened to be in
the house killed or dispersed.  The archpriest had let himself down by a
window; he broke his thigh; he was found hiding in a bush; the castle was
in flames.  "No mercy, no mercy!" shouted the madmen; "the Spirit willeth
that he die."  Every one of the Huguenots stabbed the poor wretch with
their poniards: "That's for my father, broken on the wheel; that's for my
brother, sent to the galleys; that's for my mother, who died of grief;
that's for my relations in exile!"  He received fifty-two wounds.  Next
day the Cevennes were everywhere in revolt.  A prophet named Seguier was
at the head of the insurrection.  He was soon made prisoner.  "How dost
thou expect me to treat thee?" asked his judge.  "As I would have treated
thee, had I caught thee," answered the prophet.  He was burned alive in
the public square of Pont-de-Montvert, a mountain burgh.  "Where do you
live?" he had been asked at his examination.  "In the desert," he
replied, "and soon in heaven."  He exhorted the people from the midst of
the flames.  The insurrection went on spreading.  "Say not, What can we
do? we are so few; we have no arms!" said another prophet, named Laporte.
"The Lord of hosts is our strength!  We will intone the battle-psalms,
and, from the Lozere to the sea, Israel shall arise!  And, as for arms,
have we not our axes?  They will beget muskets!"  The plain rose like the
mountain.  Baron St. Comes, an early convert, and colonel of the militia,
was assassinated near Vauvert; murders multiplied; the priests were
especially the object of the revolters' vengeance.  They assembled under
the name of _Children of God,_ and marched under the command of two
chiefs, one, named Roland, who formerly served under Catinat, and the
other, a young man, whiles a baker and whiles a shepherd, who was born in
the neighborhood of Anduze, and whose name has remained famous.
John Cavalier was barely eighteen when M. de Baville launched his
brother-in-law, the Count of Broglie, with a few troops upon the
revolted Cevenols. The Catholic peasants called them Camisards, the
origin of which name has never been clearly ascertained.  M. de Broglie
was beaten; the insurrection, which was entirely confined to the
populace, disappeared all at once in the woods and rocks of the country,
to burst once more unexpectedly upon the troops of the king.  The great
name of Lamoignon shielded Baville; Chamillard had for a long while
concealed from Louis XIV. the rising in the Cevennes.  He never did know
all its gravity.  "It is useless," said Madame de Maintenon, "for the
king to trouble himself with all the circumstances of this war; it would
not cure the mischief, and would do him much."  "Take care," wrote
Chamillard to Baville, on superseding the Count of Broglie by Marshal
Montrevel, "not to give this business the appearance of a serious war."
The rumor of the insurrection in Languedoc, however, began to spread in
Europe.  Conflagrations, murders, executions in cold blood or in the
heat of passion, crimes on the part of the insurgents, as well as
cruelties on the part of judges and generals, succeeded one another
uninterruptedly, without the military authorities being able to crush a
revolt that it was impossible to put down by terror or punishments.  "I
take it for a fact," said a letter to Chamillard from M. de Julien, an
able captain of irregulars, lately sent into Languedoc to aid the Count
of Broglie, "that there are not in this district forty who are real
converts, and are not entirely on the side of the Camisards.  I include
in that number females as well as males, and the mothers and daughters
would give the more striking proofs of their fury if they had the
strength of the men.  .  .  .  I will say but one word more, which is,
that the children who were in their cradles at the time of the general
conversions, as well as those who were four or five years old, are now
more Huguenot than the fathers; nobody, however, has set eyes upon any
minister; how, then, comes it that they are so Huguenot?  Because the
fathers and mothers brought them up in those sentiments all the time
they were going to mass.  You may rely upon it that this will continue
for many generations."  M. de Julien came to the conclusion that the
proper way was to put to the sword all the Protestants of the country
districts and burn all the villages.  M. de Baville protested.  "It is
not a question of exterminating these people," he said, "but of reducing
them, of forcing them to fidelity; the king must have industrious people
and flourishing districts preserved to him." The opinion of the generals
prevailed; the Cevenols were proclaimed outlaws, and the pope decreed a
crusade against them.  The military and religious enthusiasm of the
Camisards went on increasing.  Cavalier, young and enterprising, divided
his time between the boldest attempts at surprise and mystical
ecstasies, during which he singled out traitors who would have
assassinated him or sinners who were not worthy to take part in the
Lord's Supper. The king's troops ravaged the country; the Camisards, by
way of reprisal, burned the Catholic villages; everywhere the war was
becoming horrible.  The peaceable inhabitants, Catholic or Protestant,
were incessantly changing from wrath to terror. Cavalier, naturally
sensible and humane, sometimes sank into despondency.  He would fling
himself on his knees, crying, Lord, turn aside the king from following
the counsels of the wicked!" and then he would set off again upon a new
expedition.  The struggle had been going on for two years, and Languedoc
was a scene of fire and bloodshed.  Marshal Montrevel had gained great
advantages when the king ordered Villars to put an end to the revolt.
"I made up my mind," writes Villars, in his Memoires, "to try
everything, to employ all sorts of ways except that of ruining one of
the finest provinces in the kingdom, and that, if I could bring back the
offenders without punishing them, I should preserve the best soldiers
there are in the kingdom.  They are, said I to myself, Frenchmen, very
brave and very strong, three qualities to be considered."  "I shall
always," he adds, "have two ears for two sides."

"We have to do here with a very extraordinary people," wrote the marshal
to Chamillard, soon after his arrival; "it is a people unlike anything I
ever knew--all alive, turbulent, hasty, susceptible of light as well as
deep impressions, tenacious in its opinions.  Add thereto zeal for
religion, which is as ardent amongst heretics as Catholics, and you will
no longer be surprised that we should be often very much embarrassed.
There are three sorts of Camisards: the first, with whom we might arrange
matters by reason of their being weary of the miseries of war.  The
second, stark mad on the subject of religion, absolutely intractable on
that point; the first little boy or little girl that falls a-trembling
and declares that the Holy Spirit is speaking to it, all the people
believe it, and, if God with all his angels were to come and speak to
them, they would not believe them more; people, moreover, on whom the
penalty of death makes not the least impression; in battle they thank
those who inflict it upon them; they walk to execution singing the
praises of God and exhorting those present, insomuch that it has often
been necessary to surround the criminals with drums to prevent the
pernicious effect of their speeches.  Finally, the third: people without
religion, accustomed to pillage, to murder, to quarter themselves upon
the peasants; a rascalry furious, fanatical, and swarming with
prophetesses."

Villars had arrived in Languedoc the day after the checks encountered by
the Camisards.  The despondency and suffering were extreme; and the
marshal had Cavalier sounded.

"What do you want to lay down your arms?" said the envoy.  "Three
things," replied the Cevenol chief: "liberty of conscience, the release
of our brethren detained in the prisons and the galleys, and if these
demands are refused, permission to quit France with ten thousand
persons."  The negotiators were intrusted with the most flattering offers
for Cavalier.  Sensible, and yet vain, moved by his country's woes, and
flattered by the idea of commanding a king's regiment, the young Camisard
allowed himself to be won.  He repaired formally to Nimes for an
interview with the marshal.  "He is a peasant of the lowest grade," wrote
Villars to Chamillard, "who is not twenty-two, and does not look
eighteen; short, and with no imposing air, qualities essential for the
lower orders, but surprising good sense and firmness.  I asked him
yesterday how he managed to keep his fellows under.  'Is it possible,'
said I, 'that, at your age, and not being long used to command, you found
no difficulty in often ordering to death your own men?'  'No, sir,' said
he, 'when it seemed to me just.'  'But whom did you employ to inflict
it?'  'The first whom I ordered, and nobody ever hesitated to follow my
orders.'  I fancy, sir, that you will consider this rather surprising.
Furthermore, he shows great method in the matter of his supplies, and he
disposes his troops for an engagement as well as very experienced
officers could do.  It is a piece of luck if I get such a man away from
them."

Cavalier's fellows began to escape from his sway.  They had hoped, for a
while, that they would get back that liberty for which they had shed
their blood.  "They are permitted to have public prayer and chant their
psalms.  No sooner was that known all round," writes Villars, "than
behold my madmen rushing up from burghs and castles in the neighborhood,
not to surrender, but to chant with the rest.  The gates were closed;
they leap the walls and force the guards.  It is published abroad that I
have indefinitely granted free exercise of the religion."  The bishops
let the marshal be.

"Stuff we our ears," said the Bishop of Narbonne, "and make we an end."
The Camisards refused to listen to Cavalier.

"Thou'rt mad," said Roland; "thou bast betrayed thy brethren; thou
shouldst die of shame.  Go tell the marshal that I am resolved to remain
sword in hand until the entire and complete restoration of the Edict of
Nantes!"  The Cevenols thought themselves certain of aid from England;
only a handful followed Cavalier, who remained faithful to his
engagements.  He was ordered with his troop to Elsass; he slipped away
from his watchers and threw himself into Switzerland.  At the head of a
regiment of refugees he served successively the Duke of Savoy, the
States-General, and England; he died at Chelsea in 1740, the only one
amongst the Camisards to leave a name in the world.

[Illustration: Death of Roland the Camisard----569]

The insurrection still went on in Languedoc under the orders of Roland,
who was more fanatical and more disinterested than Cavalier; he was
betrayed and surrounded in the castle of Castelnau on the 16th of August,
1704.  Roland just had time to leap out of bed and mount his horse; he
was taking to flight with his men by a back door when a detachment of
dragoons came up with him; the Camisard chief put his back against an old
olive and sold his life dearly.  When he fell, his lieutenants let
themselves be taken "like lambs" beside his corpse.  "They were destined
to serve as examples," writes Villars, "but the manner in which they met
death was more calculated to confirm their religious spirit in these
wrong heads than to destroy it.  Lieutenant Maille was a fine young man
of wits above the common.  He heard his sentence with a smile, passed
through the town of Nimes with the same air, begging the priest not to
plague him; the blows dealt him did not alter this air in the least, and
did not elicit a single exclamation.  His arms broken, he still had
strength to make signs to the priest to be off, and, as long as he could
speak, he encouraged the others.  That made me think that the quickest
death is always best with these fellows, and that their sentence should
above all things bear reference to their obstinacy in revolt rather than
in religion."  Villars did not carry executions to excess, even in the
case of the most stubborn; little by little the chiefs were killed off in
petty engagements or died in obscurity of their wounds; provisions were
becoming scarce; the country was wasted; submission became more frequent
every day.  The principals all demanded leave to quit France.  "There are
left none but a few brigands in the Upper Cevennes," says Villars.  Some
partial risings, alone recalled, up to 1709, the fact that the old leaven
still existed; the war of the Camisards was over.  It was the sole
attempt in history on the part of French Protestantism since Richelieu,
a strange and dangerous effort made by an ignorant and savage people;
roused to enthusiasm by persecution, believing itself called upon by the
spirit of God to win, sword in hand, the freedom of its creed under the
leadership of two shepherd soldiers and prophets.  Only the Scottish
Cameronians have presented the same mixture of warlike ardor and pious
enthusiasm, more gloomy and fierce with the men of the North, more
poetical and prophetical with the Cevenols, flowing in Scotland as in
Languedoc from religious oppression and from constant reading of the Holy
Scriptures.  The silence of death succeeded everywhere in France to the
plaints of the Reformers and to the crash of arms; Louis XIV. might well
suppose that Protestantism in his dominions was dead.

It was a little before the time when the last of the Camisards, Abraham
Mazel and Claris, perished near Uzes (in 1710), that the king struck the
last blow at Jansenism by destroying its earliest nest and its last
refuge, the house of the nuns of Port-Royal des Champs.  With truces and
intervals of apparent repose, the struggle had lasted more than sixty
years between the Jesuits and Jansenism.  M. de St. Cyran, who left the
Bastille a few months after the death of Richelieu, had dedicated the
last days of his life to writing against Protestantism, being so much the
more scared by the heresy in that, perhaps, he felt himself attracted
thereto by a secret affinity.  He was already dying when there appeared
the book Frequente Communion, by M. Arnauld, youngest son and twentieth
child of that illustrious family of Arnaulds in whom Jansenism seemed to
be personified.  The author was immediately accused at Rome, and buried
himself for twenty years in retirement.  M. de St. Cyran was still
working, dictating Christian thoughts and points touching death.
_Stantem mori oportet_ (One should die in harness), he would say.  On the
3d of October, 1643, he succumbed suddenly, in the arms of his friends.
"I cast my eyes upon the body, which was still in the same posture in
which death had left it," writes Lancelot, "and I thought it so full of
majesty and of mien so dignified that I could not tire of admiring it,
and I fancied that he would still have been capable, in the state in
which he was, of striking with awe the most passionate of his foes, had
they seen him."  It was the most cruel blow that could have fallen upon
the pious nuns of Port-Royal.  "_Dominus in coelo!_  (Lord in heaven!)"
was all that was said by Mother Angelica Arnauld, who, like M. de St.
Cyran himself, centred all her thoughts and all her affections upon
eternity.

With his dying breath M. de St. Cyran had said to M. Gudrin, physician to
the college of Jesuits, "Sir, tell your Fathers, when I am dead, not to
triumph, and that I leave behind me a dozen stronger than I."  With all
his penetration the director of consciences was mistaken; none of those
he left behind him would have done his work; he had inspired with the
same ardor and the same constancy the strong and the weak, the violent
and the pacific; he had breathed his mighty faith into the most diverse
souls, fired with the same zeal penitents and nuns, men rescued from the
scorching furnace of life in the world, and women brought up from infancy
in the shade of the cloister.  M. Arnauld was a great theologian, an
indefatigable controversialist, the oracle and guide of his friends in
their struggle against the Jesuits; M. de Sacy and M. Singlin were wise
and able directors, as austere as M. de St. Cyran in their requirements,
less domineering and less rough than he; but M. de St. Cyran alone was
and could be the head of Jansenism; he alone could have inspired that
idea of immolation of the whole being to the sovereign will of God, as to
the truth which resides in Him alone.  Once assured of this point, M. de
St. Cyran became immovable.  Mother Angelica pressed him to appear before
the archbishop's council, which was to pronounce upon his book _Theologie
familiere_.  "It is always good to humble one's self," she said.  "As for
you," he replied, "who are in that disposition, and would not in any
respect compromise the honor of the truth, you could do it; but as for
me, I should break down before the eyes of God if I consented thereto;
the weak are more to be feared sometimes than the wicked."

Mother Angelica Arnauld, to whom these lines were addressed, was the most
perfect image and the most accomplished disciple of M. de St. Cyran.
More gentle and more human than he, she was quite as strong and quite as
zealous.  "It is necessary to be dead to everything, and after that to
await everything; such was the motto of her inward life and of the
constant effort made by this impassioned soul, susceptible of all tender
affections, to detach herself violently and irrevocably from earth.  The
instinct of command, loftiness and breadth of views, find their place
with the holy priest and with the nun; the mind of M. de St. Cyran was
less practical and his judgment less simple than that of the abbess,
habituated as she had been from childhood to govern the lives of her nuns
as their conscience.  A reformer of more than one convent since the day
when she had closed the gates of Port-Royal against her father,
M. Arnauld, in order to restore the strictness of the cloister, Mother
Angelica carried rule along with her, for she carried within herself the
government, rigid, no doubt, for it was life in a convent, but
characterized by generous largeness of heart, which caused the yoke to be
easily borne.

"To be perfect, there is no need to do singular things," she would often
repeat, after St. Francis de Sales; "what is needed is to do common
things singularly well!"  She carried the same zeal from convent to
convent, from Port-Royal des Champs to Port-Royal de Paris; from
Maubuisson, whither her superiors sent her to establish a reformation, to
St. Sacrement, to establish union between the two orders; ever devoted to
religion, without having chosen her vocation; attracting around her all
that were hers; her mother, a wife at twelve years of age, and astonished
to find herself obeying after having commanded her twenty children for
fifty years; five of her sisters; nieces and cousins; and in "the
Desert," beside Port-Royal des Champs, her brothers, her nephews, her
friends, steeped like herself in penitence.  Before her, St. Bernard had
"dispeopled the world " of those whom he loved, by an error common to
zealous souls and exclusive spirits, solely occupied with thoughts of
salvation.  Even in solitude Mother Angelica had not found rest.  "I am
not fit to live on earth," she would say; "I know not why I am still
there; I can no longer bear either myself or others; there is none that
seeketh after God."  She was piously unjust towards her age, and still
more towards her friends; it was the honorable distinction of M. de St.
Cyran and his disciples that they did seek after God and holiness, at
every cost and every risk.

Mother Angelica was nearing the repose of eternity, the only repose
admitted by her brother M. Arnauld, when the storm of persecution burst
upon the monastery.  The Augustinus of Jansenius, Bishop of Ypres, a
friend of M. de St. Cyran's, had just been condemned at Rome.  Five
propositions concerning grace were pronounced heretical.  "The pope has a
right to condemn them," said the Jansenists, "if they are to be found in
the Augustinus, but, in fact, they are not to be found there."  The
dispute waxed hot; M. Arnauld threw himself into it passionately.  He, in
his turn, was condemned by the Sorbonne.  "This is the very day," he
wrote to his sister, Mother Angelica, "when I am to be wiped out from the
number of the doctors; I hope of God's goodness that He will not on that
account wipe me out from the number of His servants.  That is the only
title I desire to preserve."  M. Arnauld's friends pressed him to protest
against his condemnation.  "Would you let yourself be crushed like a
child?" they said.  He wrote in the theologian's vein, lengthily and
bitterly; his friends listened in silence.  Arnauld understood them.
"I see quite well that you do not consider this document a good one for
its purpose," said he, "and I think you are right; but you who are
young," and he turned towards Pascal, who had a short time since retired
to Port-Royal, "you ought to do something."  This was the origin of the
_Lettres Provinciales_.  For the first time Pascal wrote, something other
than a treatise on physics.  He revealed himself all at once and
entirely.  The recluses of Port-Royal were obliged to close their
schools; they had to disperse.  Arnauld concealed himself with his friend
Nicole.  "I am having search made everywhere for M. Arnauld," said Louis
XIV. to Boileau, who was supposed to be much attached to the Jansenists.
"Your Majesty always was lucky," replied Boileau; "you will not find
him."

The nuns' turn had come; orders were given to send away the pensioners
(pupils); Mother Angelica set out for the house at Paris, "where was the
battle-ground."  [_Memoires pour servir a l'Histoire de Port-Royal,_
t. ii.  p. 127.] As she was leaving the house in the fields, which was so
dear to her, she met in the court-yard M. d'Andilly, her brother, who was
waiting to say good by to her.  When he came up to her, she said to him,
"Good by, my dear brother; be of good courage, whatever happens."  "Fear
nothing, my dear sister; I am perfectly so."  But she replied, "Brother,
brother, let us be humble.  Let us remember that humility without
fortitude is cowardice, but that fortitude without humility is
presumption."  "When she arrived at the convent in Paris, she found us
for the most part very sad," writes her niece, Mother Angelica de St.
Jean, "and some were in tears.  She, looking at us with an open and
confident countenance, said, 'Why, I believe there is weeping here!
Come, my children, what is all this?  Have you no faith?  And at what are
you dismayed?  What if men do rage?  Eh?  Are you afraid of that?  They
are but flies!  You hope in God, and yet fear anything!  Fear but Him,
and, trust me, all will be well;' and to Madame de Chevreuse, who came to
fetch her daughters, 'Madame, when there is no God I shall lose courage;
but, so long as God is God, I shall hope in Him.'"  She succumbed,
however, beneath the burden; and the terror she had always felt of death
aggravated her sufferings.  "Believe me, my children," she would say to
the nuns, "believe what I tell you.  People do not know what death is,
and do not think about it.  As for me, I have apprehended it all my life,
and have always been thinking about it.  But all I have imagined is less
than nothing in comparison with what it is, with what I feel, and with
what I comprehend at this moment.  It would need but such thoughts to
detach us from everything."  M. Singlin, being obliged to conceal
himself, came secretly to see her; she would not have her nephew, M. de
Sacy, run the same risk.  "I shall never see him more," she said; "it is
God's will; I do not vex myself about it.  My nephew without God could be
of no use to me, and God without my nephew will be all in all to me."
The grand-vicar of the Archbishop of Paris went to Port-Royal to make
sure that the pensioners had gone.  He sat down beside Mother Angelica's
bed.  "So you are ill, mother," said he; "pray, what is your complaint?"
"I am dropsical, sir," she replied.  "Jesus! my dear mother, you say that
as if it were nothing at all.--Does not such a complaint dismay you?"

"No, sir," she replied; "I am incomparably more dismayed at what I see
happening in our house.  For, indeed, I came hither to die here, but I
did not come to see all that I now see, and I had no reason to expect the
kind of treatment we are having.  Sir, sir, this is man's day; God's day
will come, who will reveal many things and avenge everything."  She died
on the 6th of August, 1661, murmuring over and over again, "Good by; good
by!"  And, when she was asked why she said that, she replied simply,
"Because I am going away, my children."  She had given instructions to
bury her in the preau (court-yard), and not to have any nonsense
(_badineries_) after her death.  "I am your Jonas," she said to the nuns;
"when I am thrown into the whale's belly the tempest will cease."  She
was mistaken; the tempest was scarcely beginning.

Cardinal de Retz was still titular Archbishop of Paris, and rather
favorable to Jansenism.  It was, therefore, the grandvicars who prepared
the exhortation to the faithful, calling upon them to accept the papal
decision touching Jansen's book.  There was drawn up a formula or
formulary of adhesion, "turned with some skill," says Madame Perier her
biography of Jacqueline Pascal, and in such a way that subscription did
not bind the conscience, as theologians most scrupulous about the truth
affirmed; the nuns of Port-Royal, however, refused to subscribe.  "What
hinders us," said a letter to Mother Angelica de St. Jean from Jacqueline
Pascal, Sister St. Euphemia in religion, "what hinders all the
ecclesiastics who recognize the truth, to reply, when the formulary is
presented to them to subscribe, 'I know the respect I owe the bishops,
but my conscience does not permit me to subscribe that a thing is in a
book in which I have not seen it,' and after that wait for what will
happen?  What have we to fear?  Banishment and dispersion for the nuns,
seizure of temporalities, imprisonment and death, if you will; but is not
that our glory, and should it not be our joy?  Let us renounce the gospel
or follow the maxims of the gospel, and deem ourselves happy to suffer
somewhat for righteousness' sake.  I know that it is not for daughters to
defend the truth, though one might say, unfortunately, that since the
bishops have the courage of daughters, the daughters must have the
courage of bishops; but, if it is not for us to defend the truth, it is
for us to die for the truth, and suffer everything rather than abandon
it."

Jacqueline subscribed, divided between her instinctive repugnance and her
desire to show herself a "humble daughter of the Catholic church."  "It
is all we can concede," she said; "for the rest, come what may, poverty,
dispersion, imprisonment, death, all this seems to me nothing in
comparison with the anguish in which I should pass the remainder of my
life if I had been wretch enough to make a covenant with death on so
excellent an occasion of paying to God the vows of fidelity which our
lips have pronounced."  "Her health was so shaken by the shock which all
this business caused her," writes Madame Prier, "that she fell
dangerously ill, and died soon after."  "Think not, I beg of you, my
father," she wrote to M. Arnauld, "firm as I may appear, that nature does
not greatly apprehend all the consequences of this; but I hope that grace
will sustain me, and it seems to me as if I feel it."  "The king does all
he wills," Madame de Guemenee had said to M. Le Tellier, whom she was
trying to soften towards Port-Royal; "he makes princes of the blood, he
makes archbishops and bishops, and he will make martyrs likewise."
Jacqueline Pascal was "the first victim" of the formulary.

She was not the only one.  "It will not stop there," said the king, to
whom it was announced that the daughters of Port-Royal consented to sign
the formulary on condition only of giving an explanation of their
conduct.  Cardinal de Retz had at last sent in his resignation.  M. du
Marca, archbishop designate in succession to him, died three days after
receiving the bulls from Rome; Hardouin de Porefix had just been
nominated in his place.  He repaired to Port-Royal.  The days of grace
were over, the nuns remained indomitable.

"What is the use of all your prayers?" said he to Sister Christine
Brisquet; "what ground for God to listen to you?  You go to Him and say,
'My God, give me Thy spirit and Thy grace; but, my God, I do not mean to
subscribe; I will take good care not to do that for all that may be
said.'  After that, what ground for God to hearken to you?"  He forbade
the nuns the sacraments.  "They are pure as angels and proud as demons,"
repeated the archbishop angrily, as he left the convent.  On the 25th of
August he returned to Port-Royal, accompanied by a numerous escort of
ecclesiastics and exons.  "When I say a thing, so it must be," he said as
he entered; "I will not eat my words."  He picked out twelve nuns, who
were immediately taken away and dispersed in different monasteries.  M.
d'Andilly was at the gate, receiving in his carriage his sister, Mother
Agnes, aged and infirm, and his three daughters doomed to exile.  "I had
borne up all day without weeping and without inclination thereto," writes
Mother Angelica de St. Jean on arrival at the _Annonciades bleues;_ "but
when night came, and, after finishing all my prayers, I thought to lay me
down and take some rest, I felt myself all in a moment bruised and
lacerated in every part by the separations I had just gone through; I
then found sensibly that, to escape weakness in the hour of deep
affliction, there must be no dropping of the eyes that have been lifted
to the mountains."  Ten months later the exiled nuns returned, without
having subscribed, to Port-Royal des Champs, a little before the moment
when M. de Saci, who had become their secret director since the death of
M. Singlin, was arrested, together with his secretary, Fontaine, at six
in the morning, in front of the Bastille.  "As he had for two years past
been expecting imprisonment, he had got the epistles of St. Paul bound up
together so as to always carry them about with him. 'Let them do with me
what they please,' he was wont to say; 'wherever they put me, provided
that I have my St. Paul with me, I fear nothing.'"  On the 13th of May,
1666, the day of his arrest, M. de Saci had for once happened to forget
his book.  He was put into the Bastille, after an examination "which
revealed a man of much wit and worth," said the king himself.  Fontaine
remained separated from him for three months.  "Liberty, for me, is to be
with M. de Saci," said the faithful secretary; "open the door of his room
and that of the Bastille, and you will see to which of the two I shall
run.  Without him everything will be prison to me; I shall be free
wherever I see him."  At last he had the joy of recovering his
well-beloved master, strictly watched and still deprived of the
sacraments.  Like Luther at Wartburg, he was finishing the revisal of his
translation of the Bible, when his cousins, MM. de Pomponne and Arnauld,
entered his room on the 31st of October, 1668.  They chatted a while
without any appearance of impatience on the part of M. de Saci.  "You are
free," said his friends at last, who had wanted to prove him; "and they
showed him the king's order, which he read," says Abbe Arnauld, "without
any change of countenance, and as little affected by joy as he had been a