t was the 24th of July,
1702. At ten o'clock in the evening, a party of about fifty resolute
Protestants, thoroughly armed, and chanting a psalm, broke into the
palace of the infamous ecclesiastic, released the prisoners from the
dungeon vaults, seized the abbe, and, after compelling him to look
upon the mangled bodies and broken bones of his victims, put him to
death by a dagger-stroke from each one of his assailants. The torch
was then applied, and the palace laid in ashes.

Hence commenced the terrible civil war called _The War of the
Camisards_. The Protestants were poor, dispersed, without arms, and
without leaders. Despair nerved them. They fled to rocks, to the
swamps, the forests. In their unutterable anguish they were led to
frenzies of enthusiasm. They believed that God chose their leaders,
and inspired them to action. Thus roused and impelled, they set at
defiance an army of twenty thousand men sent against them.

The terrible war lasted two years. Fiends could not have perpetrated
greater cruelties than were perpetrated by the troops of the king. It
is one of the mysteries of divine providence that _one man_ should
have been permitted to create such wide-spread and unutterable woe.
Louis XIV. wished to exterminate Protestantism from his realms.
Millions were made wretched to an intensity which no pen can describe.
Louis XIV. wished to place his grandson, without any legal title, upon
the throne of Spain. In consequence, Europe was deluged in blood.
Cities were sacked and burned. Provinces were devastated. Hundreds of
thousands perished in the blood of the battle-field. The book of final
judgment alone can tell how many widows and orphans went weeping to
their graves.

The Pope Clement IX. fulminated a bull against the Camisards, and
promised the absolute remission of sins to those engaged in their
extermination. Protestant England and Holland sent words of cheer to
their fellow-religionists. We can not enter into the details of this
conflict. The result was that the king found it impossible to
exterminate the Protestants, or to blot out their faith. A policy of
semi-tolerance was gradually introduced, though in various parts of
the kingdom the persecuting spirit remained for several years
unbroken. The king, chagrined by the failure of his plans, would not
allow the word Protestant or Huguenot to be pronounced in his
presence.

The distress in France was dreadful. A winter of unprecedented
severity had