of a portion of the clergy.  The system of purchasing conversions had been commenced; and Pellisson, himself originally a Protestant, had charge of the payments, a source of fraud and hypocrisies of every sort.  A declaration of 1679 condemned the relapsed to honorable amends (public recantation, &c.), to confiscation and to banishment.  The door’s of all employments were closed against Huguenots; they could no longer sit in the courts or Parliaments, or administer the finances, or become medical practitioners, barristers, or notaries; infants of seven years of age were empowered to change their religion against their parents’ will; a word, a gesture, a look, were sufficient to certify that a child intended to abjure; its parents, however, were bound to bring it up according to its condition, which often facilitated confiscation of property.  Pastors were forbidden to enter the houses of their flocks, save to perform some act of their ministry; every chapel into which a new convert had been admitted was to be pulled down, and the pastor was to be banished.  It was found necessary to set a guard at the doors of the places of worship to drive away the poor wretches who repented of a moment’s weakness; the number of “places of exercise,” as the phrase then was, received a gradual reduction; “a single minister had the charge of six, eight, and ten thousand persons,” says Elias Benoit, author of the Histoire de l’Edit de Nantes, making it impossible for him to visit and assist the families, scattered sometimes over a distance of thirty leagues round his own residence.  The wish was to reduce the ministers to give up altogether from despair of discharging their functions.  The chancellor had expressly said, “If you are reduced to the impossible, so much the worse for you; we shall gain by it.”  Oppression was not sufficient to break down the Reformers.  There was great difficulty in checking emigration, by this time increasing in numbers.  Louvois proposed stronger measures.  The population was crushed under the burden of military billets.  Louvois wrote to Marillac, superintendent of Poitou, “His Majesty has learned with much joy the number of people who continue to become converts in your department.  He desires you to go on paying attention thereto; he will think it a good idea to have most of the cavalry and officers quartered upon Protestants; if, according to the regular proportion, the religionists should receive ten, you can make them take twenty.”  The dragoons took up their quarters in peaceable families, ruining the more well-to-do, maltreating old men, women, and children, striking them with their sticks or the flat of their swords, hauling off Protestants in the churches by the hair of their heads, harnessing laborers to their own ploughs, and goading them like oxen.  Conversions became numerous in Poitou.  Those who could fly left France, at the risk of being hanged if the attempt happened to fail.  “Pray lay out advantageously