ed. The presbyteries and synods met regularly and
secretly in a cave, or the hollow bed of a river, or among the
mountains. They cheered each other up, though their progress was
usually over the bodies of their dead friends.

For any pastor or preacher to be apprehended, was, of course, certain
death. Thus, out of thirteen Huguenots who were found worshipping in a
private apartment at Montpellier, in 1723, Vesson, the pastor, and
Bonicel and Antoine Comte, his assistants, were at once condemned and
hanged on the Peyrou, the other ten persons being imprisoned or sent
to the galleys for life.

Shortly after, Huc, the aged pastor, was taken prisoner in the
Cevennes, brought to Montpellier, and hanged in the same place. A
reward of a thousand livres was offered by Bernage, the intendant, for
the heads of the remaining preachers, the fatal list comprising the
names of Court, Cortez, Durand, Rouviere, Bombonnoux, and others. The
names of these "others" were not mentioned, not being yet thought
worthy of the gibbet.

And yet it was at this time that the Bishop of Alais made an appeal to
the government against the toleration shown to the Huguenots! In 1723,
he sent a long memorial to Paris, alleging that Catholicism was
suffering a serious injury; that not only had the "new converts"
withdrawn themselves from the Catholic Church, but that the old
Catholics themselves were resorting to the Huguenot assemblies; that
sometimes their meetings numbered from three to four thousand persons;
that their psalms were sometimes overheard in the surrounding
villages; that the churches were becoming deserted, the cures in some
parishes not being able to find a single Catholic to serve at Mass;
that the Protestants had ceased to send their children to school, and
were baptized and married without the intervention of the Church.

In consequence of these representations, the then Regent, the Duke of
Bourbon, sent down an urgent order to the authorities to carry out the
law--to prevent meetings, under penalty of death to preachers, and
imprisonment at the galleys to all who attended them, ordering that
the people should be _forced_ to go to church and the children to
school, and reviving generally the severe laws against Protestantism
issued by Louis XIV. The result was that many of the assemblies were
shortly after attacked and dispersed, many persons were made prisoners
and sent to the galleys, and many more preachers were apprehended,
ra