Thus the insurrection seemed to grow, notwithstanding all the measures
taken to repress it. The number of soldiers stationed in the province
was from time to time increased; they were scattered in detachments
all over the country, and the Camisards took care to give them but
few opportunities of exhibiting their force, and then only when at a
comparative disadvantage. The Royalists, at their wits' end,
considered what was next to be done in order to the pacification of
the country. The simple remedy, they knew, was to allow these poor
simple people to worship in their own way without molestation. Grant
them this privilege, and they were at any moment ready to lay down
their arms, and resume their ordinary peaceful pursuits.

But this was precisely what the King would not allow. To do so would
be an admission of royal fallibility which neither he nor his advisers
were prepared to make. To enforce conformity on his subjects, Louis
XIV. had already driven some half-a-million of the best of them into
exile, besides the thousands who had perished on gibbets, in dungeons,
or at the galleys. And was he now to confess, by granting liberty of
worship to these neatherds, carders, and peasants, that the rigorous
policy of "the Most Christian King" had been an entire mistake?

It was resolved, therefore, that no such liberty should be granted,
and that these peasants, like the rest of the King's subjects, were to
be forced, at the sword's point if necessary, to worship God in _his_
way, and not in theirs. Viewed in this light, the whole proceeding
would appear to be a ludicrous absurdity, but for its revolting
impiety and the abominable cruelties with which it was accompanied.
Yet the Royalists even blamed themselves for the mercy which they had
hitherto shown to the Protestant peasantry; and the more virulent
amongst them urged that the whole of the remaining population that
would not at once conform to the Church of Rome, should forthwith be
put to the sword!

Brigadier Julien, an apostate Protestant, who had served under William
of Orange in Ireland, and afterwards under the Duke of Savoy in
Piedmont, disappointed with the slowness of his promotion, had taken
service under Louis XIV., and was now employed as a partizan chief in
the suppression of his former co-religionists in Languedoc. Like all
renegades, he was a bitter and furious persecutor; and in the councils
of Baville his voice was always raised for the extremest meas