d a hangman, ran through the province
early in 1745, spreading terror everywhere. One of their exploits was
to seize a sick old Huguenot, drag him from his bed, and force him
towards prison. He died upon the road.

In February, it was ascertained that the Huguenots met for worship in
a certain cavern. The owner of the estate on which the cavern was
situated, though unaware of the meetings, was fined a thousand crowns,
and imprisoned for a year in the Castle of Cret.

Next month, Louis Ranc, a pastor, was seized at Livron while baptizing
an infant, taken to Die, and hanged. He had scarcely breathed his
last, when the hangman cut the cord, hewed off the head, and made a
young Protestant draw the corpse along the streets of Die.

In the month of April, 1745, Jacques Roger, the old friend and
coadjutor of Court--the apostle of Dauphiny as Court had been of
Languedoc--was taken prisoner and conducted to Grenoble. Roger was
then eighty years old, worn out with privation and hard work. He was
condemned to death. He professed his joy at being still able to seal
with his blood the truths he had so often proclaimed. On his way to
the scaffold, he sang aloud the fifty-first Psalm. He was executed in
the Place du Breuil. After he had hung for twenty-four hours, his body
was taken down, dragged along the streets of Grenoble, and thrown into
the Isere.

At Grenoble also, in the same year, seven persons were condemned to
the galleys. A young woman was publicly whipped at the same place for
attending a Huguenot meeting. Seven students and pastors who could not
be found, were hanged in effigy. Four houses were demolished for
having served as asylums for preachers. Fines were levied on all
sides, and punishments of various kinds were awarded to many hundred
persons. Thus persecution ran riot in Dauphiny in the years 1745 and
1746.

In Languedoc it was the same. The prisons and the galleys were always
kept full. Dragoons were quartered in the Huguenot villages, and by
this means the inhabitants were soon ruined. The soldiers pillaged the
houses, destroyed the furniture, tore up the linen, drank all the
wine, and, when they were in good humour, followed the cattle, swine,
and fowl, and killed them off sword in hand. Montauban, an old
Huguenot town, was thus ruined in the course of a very few months.

One day, in a Languedoc village, a soldier seized a young girl with a
foul intention. She cried aloud, and the villagers came to her r