the money you are going to have,” wrote Madame de Maintenon to her brother, M. d’Aubigne.  “Land in Poitou is to be had for nothing, and the desolation amongst the Protestants will cause more sales still.  You may easily settle in grand style in that province.”  “We are treated like enemies of the Christian denomination,” wrote, in 1662, a minister named Jurieu, already a refugee in Holland.  “We are forbidden to go near the children that come into the world, we are banished from the bars and the faculties, we are forbidden the use of all the means which might save us from hunger, we are abandoned to the hatred of the mob, we are deprived of that precious liberty which we purchased with so many services, we are robbed of our children, who are a part of ourselves. . . .  Are we Turks?  Are we infidels?  We believe in Jesus Christ, we do; we believe Him to be the Eternal Son of God, the Redeemer of the world; the maxims of our morality are of so great purity that none dare gainsay them; we respect the king; we are good subjects, good citizens; we are Frenchmen as much as we are Reformed Christians.”  Jurieu had a right to speak of the respect for the king which animated the French Reformers.  There was no trace left of that political leaven which formerly animated the old Huguenots, and made Duke Henry de Rohan say, “You are all republicans; I would rather have to do with a pack of wolves than an assembly of parsons.”  “The king is hood winked,” the Protestants declared; and all their efforts were to get at him and tell his Majesty of their sufferings.  The army remained open to them, though without hope of promotion; and the gentlemen showed alacrity in serving the king.  “What a position is ours!” they would say; if we make any resistance, we are treated as rebels; if we are obedient, they pretend we are converted, and they hoodwink the king by means of our very submission.”

[Illustration:  The Torture of the Huguenots—–­552]

The misfortunes were redoubling.  From Poitou the persecution had extended through all the provinces.  Superintendent Foucauld obtained the conversion in mass of the province of Bearn.  He egged on the soldiers to torture the inhabitants of the houses they were quartered in, commanding them to keep awake all those who would not give in to other tortures.  The dragoons relieved one another so as not to succumb themselves to the punishment they were making others undergo.  Beating of drums, blasphemies, shouts, the crash of furniture which they hurled from side to side, commotion in which they kept these poor people in order to force them to be on their feet and hold their eyes open, were the means they employed to deprive them of rest.  To pinch, prick, and haul them about, to lay them upon burning coals, and a hundred other cruelties, were the sport of these butchers.  All they thought most about was how to find tortures which should be painful without being deadly, reducing their hosts thereby to such a state that they knew