ten
thousand persons," says Elias Benoit, author of the _Histoire de l'Edit
de Nantes,_ making it impossible for him to visit and assist the
families, scattered sometimes over a distance of thirty leagues round his
own residence. The wish was to reduce the ministers to give up
altogether from despair of discharging their functions. The chancellor
had expressly said, "If you are reduced to the impossible, so much the
worse for you; we shall gain by it." Oppression was not sufficient to
break down the Reformers. There was great difficulty in checking
emigration, by this time increasing in numbers. Louvois proposed
stronger measures. The population was crushed under the burden of
military billets. Louvois wrote to Marillac, superintendent of Poitou,
"His Majesty has learned with much joy the number of people who continue
to become converts in your department. He desires you to go on paying
attention thereto; he will think it a good idea to have most of the
cavalry and officers quartered upon Protestants; if, according to the
regular proportion, the religionists should receive ten, you can make
them take twenty." The dragoons took up their quarters in peaceable
families, ruining the more well-to-do, maltreating old men, women, and
children, striking them with their sticks or the flat of their swords,
hauling off Protestants in the churches by the hair of their heads,
harnessing laborers to their own ploughs, and goading them like oxen.
Conversions became numerous in Poitou. Those who could fly left France,
at the risk of being hanged if the attempt happened to fail. "Pray lay
out advantageously the money you are going to have," wrote Madame de
Maintenon to her brother, M. d'Aubigne. "Land in Poitou is to be had for
nothing, and the desolation amongst the Protestants will cause more sales
still. You may easily settle in grand style in that province." "We are
treated like enemies of the Christian denomination," wrote, in 1662, a
minister named Jurieu, already a refugee in Holland. "We are forbidden
to go near the children that come into the world, we are banished from
the bars and the faculties, we are forbidden the use of all the means
which might save us from hunger, we are abandoned to the hatred of the
mob, we are deprived of that precious liberty which we purchased with so
many services, we are robbed of our children, who are a part of
ourselves. . . . Are we Turks? Are we infidels? We believe in Jesu