Everywhere the new Evangelical ministry was being recruited.  “I seek them in all places,” said Court, “at the plough, or behind the counter, everywhere where I find the call for martyrdom.”  Of the six devoted men who signed the statutes of the first synod, four were destined to a martyr’s death.  The restorer of French Protestantism had made no mistake about the call then required for the holy ministry.  The synods of the desert became every year more numerous; deputies from the North, from the West, from the Centre, began to join those of the South.  Persecution continued, but it was local, more often prompted by the fanatical zeal of the superintendents than by the sovereign impulse of government; the pastors died without having to sorrow for the church, up-risen from its ruins, when a vague echo of this revival came striking upon the ears of the Duke and Madame de Prie, amidst the galas of Chantilly.  Their silence and their exhaustion had for some time protected the Protestants; fanaticism and indifference made common cause once more to crush them at their reawakening.

The storm had now been brewing for some years; the Bishop of Nantes, Lavergne de Tressan, grand almoner to the Regent, had attempted some time before to wrest from him a rigorous decree against the Protestants; the Duke of Orleans, as well as Dubois, had rejected his overtures.  Scarcely had the duke (of Bourbon) come into power, when the prelate presented his project anew; indifferent and debauched, a holder of seventy-six benefices, M. de Tressan dreamed of the cardinal’s hat, and aspired to obtain it from the Court of Rome at the cost of a persecution.  The government was at that time drifting about, without compass or steersman, from the hands of Madame de Prie to those of Paris-Duverney.  Little cared they for the fate of the Reformers.  “This castaway of the regency,” says M. Lemontey, “was adopted without memorial, without examination, as an act of homage to the late king, and a simple executive formula.  The ministers of Louis XVI. afterwards found the minute of the declaration of 1724, without any preliminary report, and simply bearing on the margin the date of the old edicts.”  For aiming the thunderbolts against the Protestants, Tressan addressed himself to their most terrible executioner.  Lamoignon de Baville was still alive; old and almost at death’s door as he was, he devoted the last days of his life to drawing up for the superintendents some private instructions; an able and a cruel monument of his past experience and his persistent animosity.  He died with the pen still in his hand.