which he had composed in a cavern.  “During more than thirty years,” says one of his biographers, “he had no dwelling-place but grottoes, hovels, and cabins, whither men went to draw him like a ferocious beast.  He lived a long while in a hiding-place, which one of his faithful guides had contrived for him under a heap of stones and blackberry bushes.  It was discovered by a shepherd; and such was the wretchedness of his condition, that, when forced to abandon it, he regretted that asylum, more fitted for wild beasts than for men.”

The hulks were still full of the audience of Paul Rabaut, and Protestant women were still languishing in the unwholesome dungeon of the Tower of Constance, when the execution of the unhappy Calas, accused of having killed his son, and the generous indignation of Voltaire cast a momentary gleam of light within the sombre region of prisons and gibbets.  For the first time, public opinion, at white heat, was brought to bear upon the decision of the persecutors.  Calas was dead, but the decree of the Parliament of Toulouse which had sentenced him, was quashed by act of the council:  his memory was cleared, and the day of toleration for French Protestants began to glimmer, pending the full dawn of justice and liberty.

We have gone over in succession, and without break, the last cruel sufferings of the French Protestants; we now turn away our eyes with a feeling of relief mingled with respect and pride; we leave the free air of the desert to return to the rakes and effeminates of Louis XV.’s court.  Great was the contrast between the government which persecuted without knowing why, and the victims who suffered for a faith incessantly revived in their souls by suffering.  For two centuries the French Reformation had not experienced for a single day the formidable dangers of indifference and lukewarmness.

The young king was growing up, still a stranger to affairs, solely occupied with the pleasures of the chase, handsome, elegant, with noble and regular features, a cold and listless expression.  In the month of February, 1725, he fell ill; for two days there was great danger.  The duke thought himself to be threatened with the elevation of the house of Orleans to the throne.  “I’ll not be caught so again,” he muttered between his teeth, when he came one night to inquire how the king was, “if he recovers, I’ll have him married.”  The king did recover, but the Infanta was only seven years old.  Philip V., who had for a short time abdicated, retiring with the queen to a remote castle in the heart of the forests, had just remounted the throne after the death of his eldest son, Louis I. Small-pox had carried off the young monarch, who had reigned but eight months.  Elizabeth Farnese, aided by the pope’s nuncio and some monks who were devoted to her, had triumphed over her husband’s religious scruples and the superstitious counsels of his confessor; she was once more reigning over Spain, when she heard that the little Infanta-queen,