you receive no requisition from them just now, it is because they go in terror of their lives and fear to appear openly.  Two red flags have been carried about the streets, and municipal officers without guards have been obliged to take refuge in patriotic houses.  Although I am only a private citizen, I take the liberty of asking for aid from you, knowing that the Protestants have sent to La Vannage and La Gardonninque to ask you for reinforcements, and the arrival of fanatics from these districts would expose all good patriots to slaughter.  Knowing as I do of your kindness and justice, I have full trust that my prayer will receive your favourable attention.

“Froment, Captain of Company No. 39

“June 13, 1790, 11 o’c. p.m.”

Unfortunately for the Catholic party, Dupre and Lieutaud, to whom this letter was entrusted for delivery, and for whom passports were made out as being employed on business connected with the king and the State, were arrested at Vehaud, and their despatches laid before the Electoral Assembly.  Many other letters of the same kind were also intercepted, and the red-tufts went about the town saying that the Catholics of Nimes were being massacred.

The priest of Courbessac, among others, was shown a letter saying that a Capuchin monk had been murdered, and that the Catholics were in need of help.  The agents who brought this letter to him wanted him to put his name to it that they might show it everywhere, but were met by a positive refusal.

At Bouillargues and Manduel the tocsin was sounded:  the two villages joined forces, and with weapons in their hands marched along the road from Beaucaire to Nimes.  At the bridge of Quart the villagers of Redressan and Marguerite joined them.  Thus reinforced, they were able to bar the way to all who passed and subject them to examination; if a man could show he was a Catholic, he was allowed to proceed, but the Protestants were murdered then and there.  We may remind our readers that the “Cadets de la Croix” pursued the same method in 1704.

Meantime Descombiez, Froment, and Folacher remained masters of the ramparts and the tower, and when very early one morning their forces were augmented by the insurgents from the villages (about two hundred men), they took advantage of their strength to force a way into the house of a certain Therond, from which it was easy to effect an entrance to the Jacobin monastery, and from there to the tower adjoining, so that their line now extended from the gate at the bridge of Calquieres to that at the end of College Street.  From daylight to dusk all the patriots who came within range were fired at whether they were armed or not.

On the 14th June, at four o’clock in the morning, that part of the legion which was against the Catholics gathered together in the square of the Esplanade, where they were joined by the patriots from the adjacent towns and villages, who came in in small parties till they formed quite an army.  At five A.M.  M. de St. Pons, knowing that the windows of the Capuchin monastery commanded the position taken up by the patriots, went there with a company and searched the house thoroughly, and also the Amphitheatre, but found nothing suspicious in either.