ch that, before the end of the month, there will
not remain ten thousand Protestants in all the district of Bordeaux,
where there were one hundred and fifty thousand the 15th of last
month."

The Duke of Noailles wrote to Louvois, "The number of Protestants in
the district of Nismes is about one hundred and forty thousand. I
believe that at the end of the month there will be none left."

On the 18th of October, 1685, the king, acceding to the wishes of his
confessor and other high dignitaries of the Church, signed the
_Revocation of the Edict of Nantes_.

In the preamble to this fatal act, it was stated,

"We see now, with the just acknowledgment we owe to God, that our
measures have secured the end which we ourselves proposed, since the
better and greater part of our subjects of the pretended Reformed
religion have embraced the Catholic faith, and the maintenance of the
Edict of Nantes remains therefore superfluous."

In this act of revocation it was declared that the exercise of the
Protestant worship should nowhere be tolerated in the realm of France.
All Protestant pastors were ordered to leave the kingdom within
fifteen days, under pain of being sent to the galleys. Those
Protestant ministers who would abjure their faith and return to
Catholicism were promised a salary one third more than they had
previously enjoyed. Parents were forbidden to instruct their children
in the Protestant religion. Every child in the kingdom was to be
baptized and educated by a Catholic priest. All Protestants who had
left France were ordered to return within four months, under penalty
of the confiscation of their possessions. Any Protestant layman, man
or woman, who should attempt to emigrate, incurred the penalty of
imprisonment for life.

This infamous ordinance caused an amount of misery which can never be
gauged, and inflicted upon the prosperity of France the most terrible
blow it had ever received. Hundreds of thousands persevered in their
faith, notwithstanding all the menaces of poverty, of the dungeon, and
of utter temporal ruin. Only one year after the revocation, Marshal
Vauban wrote,

"France has lost one hundred thousand inhabitants, sixty millions of
coined money, nine thousand sailors, twelve thousand disciplined
soldiers, six hundred officers, and her most nourishing manufactures."

From this hour the fortunes of Louis XIV. began manifestly to decline.
The Protestant population of France at that time was betwe