not what they were doing, and promised anything that was wanted of them in order to escape from those barbarous bands.  Languedoc, Guienne, Angoumois, Saintonge, all the provinces in which the Reformers were numerous, underwent the same fate.  The self-restraining character of the Norman people, their respect for law, were manifested even amidst persecution; the children were torn away from Protestant families, and the chapels were demolished by act of Parliament; the soldiery were less violent than elsewhere, but the magistrates were more inveterate.  “God has not judged us unworthy to suffer ignominy for His name,” said the ministers condemned by the Parliament for having performed the offices of their ministry.  “The king has taken no cognizance of the case,” exclaimed one of the accused, Legendre, pastor of Rouen; “he has relied upon the judges; it is not his Majesty who shall give account before God; you shall be responsible, and you alone; you who, convinced as you are of our innocence, have nevertheless condemned us and branded us.”  “The Parliament of Normandy has just broken the ties which held us bound to our churches,” said Peter du Bosq.  The banished ministers took the road to Holland.  The seaboard provinces were beginning to be dispeopled.  A momentary disturbance, which led to belief in a rising of the Reformers in the Cevennes and the Vivarais, served as pretext for redoubled rigor.  Dauphiny and Languedoc were given up to the soldiery; murder was no longer forbidden them, it was merely punishing rebels; several pastors were sentenced to death; Homel, minister of Soyon in the Vivarais, seventy-five years of age, was broken alive on the wheel.  Abjurations multiplied through terror.  “There have been sixty thousand conversions in the jurisdiction of Bordeaux, and twenty thousand in that of Montauban,” wrote Louvois to his father in the first part of September, 1685; “the rapidity with which this goes on is such, that, before the end of the month, there will not remain ten thousand religionists in the district of Bordeaux, in which there were a hundred and fifty thousand on the 15th of last month.”  “The towns of Nimes, Alais, Uzes, Villeneuve, and some others, are entirely converted,” writes the Duke of Noailles to Louvois in the month of October, 1685; “those of most note in Nimes made abjuration in church the day after our arrival.  There was then a lukewarmness; but matters were put in good train again by means of some billets that I had put into the houses of the most obstinate.  I am making arrangements for going and scouring the Uvennes with the seven companies of Barbezieux, and my head shall answer for it that before the 25th of November not a Huguenot shall be left there.”