II.
So began the war of the Camisards, for the faggots that burned the prophet only added to the fire he lighted when he struck at Du Chayla. Presently his place, as leader of the revolt, was taken by an old soldier named Laporte, who gave the rising a touch of military discipline, and soon the Camisards had many captains, all men who believed themselves endowed with the gift of prophecy.
The Protestants of the Cevennes, thorough in every habit of life, took up their arms and set about the making of entrenchments and works of defence with the determination of men prepared to fight to a finish. It is easy for us in these peaceful days to deprecate their vengeful deeds, but let us remember, in charity, that if they met blood-thirstiness with the same, they were maddened by a system of oppression so brutal as to be almost beyond our belief. Their leader, Roland, issued a dispatch which for callous suggestion has seldom been equalled in the annals of war: "We, Count and Lord Roland, Generalissimo of the Protestants of France, we decree that you have to make away with, in three days, all the priests and missionaries who are among you, under pain of being burned alive, yourselves as well as they."
But the most picturesque figure among the Camisards was introduced when Jean Cavalier, a baker's apprentice at Geneva, returned to his native mountains, and by sheer force of a military genius to which history offers few parallels became the chief leader of the Camisards while still in his teens. The story of his life is romantic beyond the invention of any novelist. Not only did he succeed over a period of three years in defending many important parts of the Cevennes from organised attacks, but in the course of that time he met and defeated successively Count de Broglie and three Marshals of France—Montrevel, Berwick, and Villars—although at one time there was a force of 60,000 soldiers in the field against him. At Nages, a little village in the southern Cevennes, he encountered Montrevel, and, outnumbered by five to one, he succeeded, after a desperate conflict, in effecting a successful retreat with more than two thirds of his thousand men. Not even the blessings of the Pope on the royalist troops, and on the "holy militia," raised among the Catholic population, brought the submission of the Camisards one day nearer. Commander after commander retired baffled, and Montrevel's policy of extermination—during which four hundred and sixty-six villages in the Upper Cevennes were burned, and most of the population put to the sword—left Cavalier, still a mere lad, master of the southward mountains, threatening even to attack the great city of Nimes.
Marshal Villars, a renowned soldier, recognised the hopelessness of continuing the methods of barbarism pursued by his predecessors, and succeeded in concluding an honourable peace with Cavalier in the summer of 1704, whereby the Camisards were granted certain important rights affecting the liberty of conscience and of person. But Roland and the more fanatical section of the Protestant army held out until January of 1705, their battle-cry being, "No peace until we have our churches," Cavalier's treaty having recognised the right to assemble outside walled towns, but not in churches.
It is this extraordinary baker's apprentice—who at twenty-four had concluded a long and desperate war, in which he played a part entitling him to be remembered with national heroes such as William Tell and Sir William Wallace—that Mr. S. R. Crockett has made the chief figure in his brilliant romance of the Cevennes, Flower-o'-the-Corn.