t for a midwife and ordered her to examine the young
girl. At the end of half an hour she declared that the assertion of the
nuns was true.

"Very well," said the captain: "let them both be kept in prison for
three months; if by the end of that time the truth of this assertion
is not self-evident, both shall be hanged." When this decision was made
known to the poor woman, she was overcome by fear, and asked to see the
captain again, to whom she confessed that, led away by the entreaties of
the nuns, she had told a lie.

Upon this, the woman was sentenced to be publicly whipped, and the young
girl hanged on a gibbet round which were placed the corpses of the four
men of whose death she was the cause.

As may easily be supposed, the "Cadets of the Cross" vied with both
Catholics and Protestants in the work of destruction. One of their bands
devoted itself to destroying everything belonging to the new converts
from Beaucaire to Nimes. They killed a woman and two children at
Campuget, an old man of eighty at a farm near Bouillargues, several
persons at Cicure, a young girl at Caissargues, a gardener at Nimes, and
many other persons, besides carrying off all the flocks, furniture, and
other property they could lay hands on, and burning down the farmhouses
of Clairan, Loubes, Marine, Carlot, Campoget Miraman, La Bergerie, and
Larnac--all near St. Gilies and Manduel. "They stopped travellers on
the highways," says Louvreloeil, "and by way of finding out whether they
were Catholic or not, made them say in Latin the Lord's Prayer, the Ave
Maria, the Symbol of the Faith, and the General Confession, and those
who were unable to do this were put to the sword. In Dions nine corpses
were found supposed to have been killed by their hands, and when
the body of a shepherd who had been in the service of the Sieur de
Roussiere, a former minister, was found hanging to a tree, no one
doubted who were the murderers. At last they went so far that one of
their bands meeting the Abbe de Saint Gilles on the road, ordered him to
deliver up to them one of his servants, a new convert, in order to
put him to death. It was in vain that the abbe remonstrated with them,
telling them it was a shame to put such an affront on a man of his birth
and rank; they persisted none the less in their determination, till at
last the abbe threw his arms round his servant and presented his own
body to the blows directed at the other."

The author of The Troubles