ad he
fallen asleep, when the soldiers, informed by the spies, entered his
chamber, bound him, and marched him off on foot by night, to Alais. He
was thrown into gaol, and was afterwards judged and condemned to
death. His friends in Alais, however, secretly contrived to get an
iron chisel passed to him in prison. He raised the stone of a chamber
which communicated with his dungeon, descended to the ground, and
silently leapt the wall. He was saved.

Pastors and preachers continued to be tracked and hunted with renewed
ardour in Saintonge, Poitou, Gascony, and Dauphiny. "The Chase," as it
was called, was better organized than it had been for twenty years
previously. The Catholic clergy, however, continued to complain. The
chase, they said, was not productive enough! The hangings of pastors
were too few. The curates of the Cevennes thus addressed the
intendants: "You do not perform your duty: you are neither active
enough nor pitiless enough;"[60] and they requested the government to
adopt more vigorous measures.

[Footnote 60: E. Hughes, ii. 99. Coquerel, "L'Eglise dans le
Desert," i. 258.]

The intendants, who were thus accused, insisted that they _had_ done
their duty. They had hanged all the Huguenot preachers that the
priests and their spies had discovered and brought to them. They had
also offered increased rewards for the preachers' heads. If
Protestantism counted so large a number of adherents, _they_ were
surely not to blame for that! Had the priests themselves done _their_
duty? Thus the intendants and the cures reproached each other by
turns.

And yet the pastors and preachers had not been spared. They had been
hanged without mercy. They knew they were in the peril of constant
death. "I have slept fifteen days in a meadow," wrote Cortez, the
pastor, "and I write this under a tree." Morel, the preacher, when
attending an assembly, was fired at by the soldiers and died of his
wounds. Pierre Dortial was also taken prisoner when holding an
assembly. The host with whom he lived was condemned to the galleys for
life; the arrondissement in which the assembly had been held was
compelled to pay a fine of three thousand livres; and Dortial himself
was sentenced to be hanged. When the aged preacher was informed of his
sentence he exclaimed: "What an honour for me, oh my God! to have been
chosen from so many others to suffer death because of my constancy to
the truth." He was executed at Nismes, and