“After the capitulation of the Duc d’Angouleme I found myself,” deposes Paul Lambert, lace-maker of Nimes, “in one of several detachments under the orders of Commandant Magne and General Vogue.  In the middle of a forest near a village, the name of which I do not know, M. de Vogue and the other officer, told us we might go home.  The flag was folded up, and M. Magne put it in his pocket.  We asked our chiefs what we were to do with our arms.  M. de Vogue told us that we had better keep them, as we should need them before very long; and in any case it would be well to have them with us on the road, lest anything should happen to us.”

The three depositions are too much alike to leave room for any doubt.  The royal volunteers contravened Article I of the convention.

Being thus abandoned by their chiefs, without general and without flag, M. de Vogue’s soldiers asked no further counsel of anyone but themselves, and, as one of them has already told us, sixty-four of them joined together to hire a guide who was to show them how to get by Uzes without going through it, for they were afraid of meeting with insult there.  The guide brought them as far as Montarem without anyone opposing their passage or taking notice of their arms.

Suddenly a coachman named Bertrand, a confidential servant of Abbe Rafin, former Grand-Vicar of Alais, and of Baroness Arnaud-Wurmeser (for the abbe administered the estate of Aureillac in his own name and that of the baroness), galloped into the village of Arpaillargues, which was almost entirely Protestant and consequently Napoleonist, announcing that the miquelets (for after one hundred and ten years the old name given to the royal troops was revived) were on the way from Montarem, pillaging houses, murdering magistrates, outraging women, and then throwing them out of the windows.  It is easy to understand the effect of such a story.  The people gathered together in groups; the mayor and his assistant being absent, Bertrand was taken before a certain Boucarut, who on receiving his report ordered the generale to be beaten and the tocsin to be rung.  Then the consternation became general:  the men seized their muskets, the women and children stones and pitchforks, and everyone made ready to face a danger which only existed in the imagination of Bertrand, for there was not a shadow of foundation for the story he had told.

While the village was in this state of feverish excitement the royal volunteers came in sight.  Hardly were they seen than the cry, “There they are!  There they are!” arose on all sides, the streets were barricaded with carts, the tocsin rang out with redoubled frenzy, and everyone capable of carrying arms rushed to the entrance of the village.