the houses of the heretics,
contributed much more to their conversion than anything that I did."

The same course was followed throughout the Cevennes. It would be a
simple record of cruelty to describe in detail the military
proceedings there: the dispersion of meetings; the hanging of persons
found attending them; the breaking upon the wheel of the pastors
captured, amidst horrible tortures; the destruction of dwellings and
of the household goods which they contained. But let us take the
single instance of Homel, formerly pastor of the church at Soyon.

Homel was taken prisoner, and found guilty of preaching to his flock
after his temple had been destroyed. For this offence he was sentenced
to be broken to death upon the wheel. To receive this punishment he
was conducted to Tournon, in Viverais, where the Jesuits had a
college. He first received forty blows of the iron bar, after which he
was left to languish with his bones broken, for forty hours, until he
died. During his torments, he said: "I count myself happy that I can
die in my Master's service. What! did my glorious Redeemer descend
from heaven and suffer an ignominious death for my salvation, and
shall I, to prolong a miserable life, deny my blessed Saviour and
abandon his people?" While his bones were being broken on the wheel,
he said to his wife: "Farewell, once more, my beloved spouse! Though
you witness my bones broken to shivers, yet is my soul filled with
inexpressible joy." After life was finally extinct, his heart was
taken to Chalencon to be publicly exhibited, and his body was exposed
in like manner at Beauchatel.

De Noailles, the governor, when referring in one of his dispatches to
the heroism displayed by the tortured prisoners, said: "These wretches
go to the wheel with the firm assurance of dying martyrs, and ask no
other favour than that of dying quickly. They request pardon of the
soldiers, but there is not one of them that will ask pardon of the
King."

To return to Claude Brousson. After his eloquent defence of the
Huguenots of Montauban--the result of which, of course, was that the
church was ordered to be demolished--and the institution of processes
for the demolition of fourteen more Protestant temples, Brousson at
last became aware that the fury of the Catholics and the King was not
to be satisfied until they had utterly crushed the religion which he
served.

Brousson was repeatedly offered the office of counsellor of
Parliament