them after some officious friend, who exposed himself to afford his pastor time to escape; to walk about in disguise; to pass sentinels, imitating the extravagances of a madman or the tricks of a mountebank; to endure fatigue, cold, heat, hunger, pain, abandonment, solitude, and finally the scaffold-such was the ordinary life of a pastor of the desert. Brousson," continues M. Peyrat, "preached regularly three or four times a-week, sometimes every day, and even several times in one day; besides which there were baptisms, marriages, and funerals to be celebrated; models of prayer and rules of piety to be dictated to the little churches, that, after his departure, they might be able to continue their religious services without a pastor. This man, sweet and affectionate by disposition, never addressed his rustic auditories except by the appellation of sheep and doves. He afterwards published, under the title of 'Mystic Manna of the Desert, some of his 'sermons preached in France, in deserts and caves, during the years 1690, 1691, 1692, and 1693.' They are homilies, adapted to the wandering flocks to whom they were addressed: their style, simple, negligent, plain, but impregnated with sentiments of infinite sweetness and gentleness, is like a vessel of common clay-ware filled with milk and honey."

Bâville's utmost activity was exerted to suppress this new outbreak of Protestantism in the Cevennes, and especially to secure the apprehension of the prophets Vivens and Brousson. The movement was indeed becoming formidable. The energetic Vivens had entered into a correspondence with the Duke of Schomberg, inviting him to make a descent upon Languedoc with ten thousand men. The plan was discovered by means of a billet which Vivens had written to Schomberg, and which fell into Bâville's hands. This redoubled the exertions of the intendant to get possession of the person of the insurrectionary prophet. He was at length tracked to a cavern situated in a valley between Anduze and Alais. At the mouth of this cavern Vivens himself was shot; and two companions who were with him, Carrière and Capieu, died on the scaffold. Brousson now remained almost the last prophet of the Cevennes. At length, hunted from place to place, weakened in body, and requiring rest, Brousson left the Cevennes for a time, to revisit his family at Lausanne. Again, in the year 1695, he returned to France, and employed himself in preaching secretly to the Protestants of different provinces; and again he was obliged to quit it.

Meanwhile France was in the most wretched condition imaginable. Persecution, war, and exorbitant taxation were producing their effects. In Languedoc especially were these calamities felt. Forty thousand natives had emigrated, and large tracts of country were left desert and uncultivated. The hopes, too, which the French Protestants had entertained of a melioration of their condition, through the instrumentality of William III. of England, were extinguished by the peace of Ryswick, concluded

in 1697. The prophecies of Jurieu were falsified; and Louis XIV. still sat on his throne, the enemy of Protestantism.

Moved by the accounts which reached him of the sufferings of his Protestant countrymen, Brousson returned to France for the third time in 1697. He spent some time in Dauphiny and Languedoc. In the spring of 1698, he wrote to his wife-"The persecution is renewed. It is as violent as at first. The soldiers are ravaging the houses, carrying off the furniture, the corn, and the cattle. They tell the masters of the houses they are ruining them to make them go to mass. Bâville, hearing of Brousson's return, increased the reward for his apprehension to 600 louisd'ors. Escaping from Languedoc, the preacher made his way to Pau in Bearn. Here a letter of introduction, which he had to a faithful Protestant, was delivered by mistake to a Catholic of the same name. The authorities were informed; Brousson was seized, and sent back to Montpellier. "At his trial, on the 4th of November," says M. Peyrat, "the hall was crowded with churchmen, military officers, and lawyers, anxious to see the once celebrated jurisconsult, now a poor pastor of the desert, about to die. Brousson disdained to employ in his defence the least oratorical artifice. He spoke for about a quarter of an hour with calmness and simplicity, confining himself to saying that he was an honest man, fearing God-a minister of the gospel, who had entered France to comfort his unfortunate brethren.' He denied having been concerned in the conspiracy with the Duke of Schomberg. He was broken on the wheel that same day, having been previously strangled by a merciful order of Baville. His name was long cherished by the Protestants of Languedoc; and an account of his death was published under the title of "The Martyrdom of M. de Brousson."

THE ECSTATICS OF THE CEVENNES-OUTBREAK OF THE

GREAT INSURRECTION.

The century was now drawing to a close. Fifteen years had elapsed since the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and the condition of France during that period had been as we have described it. Hundreds of thousands of its Protestant citizens had abandoned it, to seek the liberty which it denied them in foreign lands; and those who remained were subjected to the most galling persecution, forced outwardly to conform to the Catholic worship, and enjoying only secretly, at great risks, and at rare intervals, the privilege of hearing the gospel preached by a Protestant minister. A few local insurrections, as we have seen, had broken out, but had been suppressed by the activity of the governors of the provinces. In the year 1700 all seemed over; and, turning his attention from France, Louis was engaged in making preparations for the new European war in which he was involved, for the purpose of establishing the right of his grandson, the Duke of Anjou, to succeed to the crown of Spain. This

war continued till 1713; but scarcely had it begun, when the spirit of insurrection broke out in the Cevennes more fiercely than ever. Of this new struggle, to which more particularly the name of the War of the Camisards is applied, we now proceed to give an account.

We have already mentioned the appearance of the spirit or disease (whichever we choose to call it) of ecstacy which broke out in Dauphiny and Languedoc about the year 1689. After disappearing for a while, this spirit or disease broke out again in the year 1701. We will extract our account of these singular phenomena from M. Peyrat. "The spirit," he says, "descended rarely on old persons, and never on those who were rich and well educated. It visited youth and indigence, misfortune, simple hearts, shepherds, labourers, grown-up girls, and even children. The youngest child I ever saw speak in a state of ecstacy,' says Durand Fage of Aubais, 'was a little girl of five years of age, at the village of Saint Maurice, near Euzet; but it is known in the country that the spirit has often been poured out on little children, of whom some were even yet at the breast, and who could not speak at an age so tender, except when it pleased God to announce his marvels by the mouth of such innocents.' 'I have seen,' adds Jacques Dubois of Montpellier 'I have seen, among others, a child of five months, in its mother's arms at Quissac, that spoke, with agitation and sobbings, distinctly, and with a loud voice, but yet with interruptions, which made it necessary to listen attentively to hear certain words.'*

"The Cévenols reckoned four degrees of ecstacy. The first was called l'avertissement (warning); the second, le souffle (breath); the third, la prophetie (prophecy); and the fourth and highest, le don (the gift). They remarked, however, in general, of an inspired person, He has received excellent gifts.' One of the most extraordinary gifts was assuredly that of preaching. M. de Caladon of Aulas, a man of cultivated mind, speaks thus of one of the preachers, a female servant named Jeanne. 'She was,' he says, a poor, silly peasant, aged about forty years, assuredly the most simple and ignorant creature known in our mountains. When I heard that she was preaching, and preaching wonderfully, I could not believe a word of it; it never entered into my conception that she could join four words of French together, or that she could have the boldness to speak in a company. Yet I have several times witnessed her acquit herself miraculously. When the Heavenly intelligence made her speak, this she ass of Balaam had truly a mouth of gold. Never did orator make himself

In receiving these statements, and some which follow, our readers must exercise their own discretion. It is absolutely necessary to make such quotations as those in the text, in order to give a true idea of the strange state of feeling among the Cévenols during the insurrection, when the belief in the miraculous nature of the occurrences was universal.

heard as she did; and never was auditor more attentive or more affected than those who listened to her. It was a torrent of eloquence; it was a prodigy; and-what I say is no exaggeration-she became all at once a totally new creature, and was transformed into a great preacher.'

"The number of prophets increased so rapidly, that eight thousand were counted in Languedoc the first year. Not a town, hamlet, village, or house, but had its inspired orator. All of them assembled their congregations, and that every day; so that every day eight thousand assemblies, large or small, were held between the Lozère and the sea. But the number will appear infinite when one thinks that every prophet preached twice or thrice successively. When the first sermon was over, it often happened that people who had been delayed on the road, or who came from distant cantons, reached the spot; and these, too, must be satisfied. In going to nocturnal assemblies, the worshippers directed themselves to the spot by singing psalms. The prophet, at one of these nocturnal meetings, would all at once stop, and changing his tone, inform his hearers that there were some of the faithful wandering near at hand, in the fields or the woods, in search of the congregation, and that, to bring them in, some must go out and raise a psalm. A party would quit the assembly and begin singing, and in a short time after they would return with a considerable addition of worshippers, whom the singing had attracted to the spot. Nay, sometimes, it was said, the wanderers were guided by meteors in the sky, flaming forth in the direction in which the conventicle was assembled."*

This state of things continued for about a year, before any positive insurrection broke out. Most of the troops which had been stationed in Languedoc were now withdrawn to serve in Spain and Italy; and Bâville had not means at his command to put down the nuisance, as he considered the fresh outburst of fanaticism among the Cévenols to be. The priests, however, complained bitterly of the evil effects produced by the ecstatics; and Bâville did everything in his power to extirpate them. He made fathers and mothers responsible for the ecstacies of their children; and threatened the preachers with the punishment of death. As the ecstacy of the young persons was contagious, affecting even the children of good Catholics, Bâville caused them to be confined-the boys in the prisons, and the girls in convents. As many as three hundred were confined at once in the prisons of Uzes. Of the adults, many were apprehended, and subjected to severe punishments. Daniel Raoul, Floutier, and others of the most conspicuous preachers, perished on the wheel or the gibbet; and scores of others were sent to the galleys. Even women were hanged by Bâville's orders for the crime of preaching. In one

* Histoire des Pasteurs du Désert, by M. Peyrat.

instance, it is said, a woman was put to death because, in her ecstatic state, she shed tears of blood. One can hardly imagine a more horrible state of things than this-a whole province roused to a condition of frantic emotion, in which rational piety was strangely mingled with diseased nervous excitement; and a governor trying to restore calm and order by hanging the poor people in scores. These Cévenols were not naturally more given to extravagance than the rest of their countrymen; and had their own pastors been left among them, they would have continued, as they were before, a quiet, peaceable, hard-working, and pious peasant population.

A tragical occurrence hurried on the general insurrection. One of the most zealous instruments of the persecution in Languedoc was François de Langlade du Chayla, archpriest of the Cevennes. The cruelties of this man had roused a general and bitter feeling against him among the Cévenols, and he had more than once been threatened with death. In the month of July 1702, a party of Protestants, male and female, trying to make their escape from the Cevennes, with the intention of going into exile at Geneva, were seized by the soldiery, and by the archpriest's orders committed to prison. On the following Sunday there was a fieldmeeting on the mountain of Bougès, at which a prophet of the name of Peter Séguier preached. Alluding in his sermon to the unfortunate Protestants who had been made prisoners, he declared that "the Lord had commanded him to take up arms to deliver the captive brethren, and to exterminate that archpriest of Moloch." Other preachers present followed in the same strain, one of them, Abraham Mazel, adding, "Brethren, I have had a vision. I saw large black oxen, very fat, which were browsing on the plants of a garden; and a voice said unto me, 'Abraham, drive out these oxen;' and when I did not obey, the voice again said unto me, 'Abraham, drive out these oxen.' Then I drove them out. Now, as the Spirit has revealed to me, that garden that I saw is the church of God, the black oxen which wasted it are the priests, and the voice which spoke to me is the Eternal, ordering me to drive these priests out of the Cevennes." This parable produced its effect; and next day fifty peasants met, twenty of them armed, and resolved to march to the archpriest's residence at Pont de Montvert, to inflict vengeance upon him, and release such of their brethren as were confined there. They were commanded by the preacher Séguier: Mazel was also there, and another prophet called Solomon; and not the least enthusiastic among them was a mere stripling named Jean Cavalier-afterwards well known over all France.

At ten o'clock on the evening of the 24th of July, the archpriest was sitting with some ecclesiastics in his house at Pont de Montvert, when they heard the sound of psalmody approaching. They soon became aware that the house was surrounded by Protestant peasants. "Withdraw, you Huguenot canaille!" cried