look-outs, their enemies' approach, and hide
themselves in caves; or flee up to the foot of the glaciers till they
had passed by. The attitude of the French Vaudois was thus for the
most part passive; and they very rarely, like the Italian Vaudois,
offered any determined or organized resistance to persecution. Hence
they have no such heroic story to tell of battles and sieges and
victories. Their heroism was displayed in patience, steadfastness, and
long-suffering, rather than in resisting force by force; and they were
usually ready to endure death in its most frightful forms rather than
prove false to their faith.

The ancient people of these valleys formed part of the flock of the
Archbishop of Embrun. But history exhibits him as a very cruel
shepherd. Thus, in 1335, there appears this remarkable entry in the
accounts current of the bailli of Embrun: "Item, for persecuting the
Vaudois, eight sols and thirty deniers of gold," as if the persecution
of the Vaudois had become a regular department of the public service.
What was done with the Vaudois when they were seized and tried at
Embrun further appears from the records of the diocese. In 1348,
twelve of the inhabitants of Val Louise were strangled at Embrun by
the public executioner; and in 1393, a hundred and fifty inhabitants
of the same valley were burned alive at the same place by order of the
Inquisitor Borelli. But the most fatal of all the events that befell
the inhabitants of Val Louise was that which occurred about a century
later, in 1488, when nearly the whole of the remaining population of
the valley were destroyed in a cavern near the foot of Mont Pelvoux.

This dreadful massacre was perpetrated by a French army, under the
direction of Albert Catanee, the papal legate. The army had been sent
into Piedmont with the object of subjugating or destroying the Vaudois
on the Italian side of the Alps, but had returned discomfited to
Briancon, unable to effect their object. The legate then determined to
take his revenge by an assault upon the helpless and unarmed French
Vaudois, and suddenly directed his soldiers upon the valleys of
Fressinieres and Louise. The inhabitants of the latter valley,
surprised, and unable to resist an army of some twenty thousand men,
abandoned their dwellings, and made for the mountains with all haste,
accompanied by their families, and driving their flocks before them.
On the slope of Mont Pelvoux, about a third of the way up, there