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 scar