His letter construed as authorizing a new crusade.
The new order had been skilfully drawn. The "Arrêt de Mérindol," although not alluded to by name, might naturally be understood as included under the general designation of the parliament's decrees against heretics; while the direction to employ the governor's troops against those who had not abjured could be construed as authorizing a local crusade, in which innocent and guilty were equally likely to suffer. Such were the pretexts behind which the first president and his friends prepared for a carnage which, for causelessness and atrocity, finds few parallels on the page of history.
An expedition stealthily organized.
Three months passed, and yet no attempt was made to disturb the peaceful villages on the Durance. Then the looked-for opportunity came. Count De Grignan, Governor of Provence, was summoned by the king and sent on a diplomatic mission to Germany. The civil and military administration fell into the Baron d'Oppède's hands as lieutenant. The favorable conjuncture was instantly improved. On a single day—the twelfth of April—the royal letter, hitherto kept secret, that the intended victims might receive no intimations of the impending blow, was read and judicially confirmed, and four commissioners were appointed to superintend the execution.[487] Troops were hastily levied. All men capable of bearing arms in the cities of Aix, Arles, and Marseilles were commanded, under severe penalties, to join the expedition;[488] and some companies of veteran troops, which happened to be on their way from Piedmont to the scene of the English war, were impressed into the service by D'Oppède, in the king's name.[489]
Villages burned and their inhabitants butchered.
On the thirteenth of April, the commissioners, leaving Aix, proceeded to Pertuis, on the northern bank of the Durance. Thence, following the course of the river, they reached Cadenet. Here they were joined by the Baron d'Oppède, his sons-in-law, De Pouriez and De Lauris, and a considerable force of men. A deliberation having been held, on the sixteenth, Poulain, to whom the chief command had been assigned by D'Oppède, directed his course northward, and burned Cabrièrette, Peypin, La Motte and Saint-Martin, villages built on the lands of De Cental, a Roman Catholic nobleman, at this time a minor. The wretched inhabitants, who had not until the very last moment credited the strange story of the disaster in reserve for them, hurriedly fled on the approach of the soldiery, some to the woods, others to Mérindol. Unable to defend them against a force so greatly superior in number and equipment, a part of the men are said to have left their wives, old men, and children in their forest retreat, confident that if discovered, feminine weakness and the helplessness of infancy or of extreme old age would secure better terms for them than could be hoped for in case of a brave, but ineffectual defence by unarmed men.[490] It was a confidence misplaced. Unresisting, gray-headed men were despatched with the sword, while the women were reserved for the grossest outrage, or suffered the mutilation of their breasts, or, if with child, were butchered with their unborn offspring. Of all the property spared them by previous oppressors, nothing was left to sustain the miserable survivors. For weeks they wandered homeless and penniless in the vicinity of their once flourishing settlements; and there one might not unfrequently see the infant lying on the road-side, by the corpse of the mother dead of hunger and exposure. For even the ordinary charity of the humane had been checked by an order of D'Oppède, savagely forbidding that shelter or food be afforded to heretics, on pain of the halter.[491]
Lourmarin, Villelaure, and Treizemines were next burned on the way to Mérindol. On the opposite side of the Durance, La Rocque and St. Étienne de Janson suffered the same fate, at the hands of volunteers coming from Arles. Happily they were found deserted, the villagers having had timely notice of the approaching storm.
The destruction of Mérindol.
Early on the eighteenth of April, D'Oppède reached Mérindol, the ostensible object of the expedition. But a single person was found within its circuit, and he a young man reputed possessed of less than ordinary intellect. His captor had promised him freedom, on his pledging himself to pay two crowns for his ransom. But D'Oppède, finding no other human being upon whom to vent his rage, paid the soldier the two crowns from his own pocket, and ordered the youth to be tied to an olive-tree and shot. The touching words uttered by the simple victim, as he turned his eyes heavenward and breathed out his life, have been preserved: "Lord God, these men are snatching from me a life full of wretchedness and misery, but Thou wilt give me eternal life through Jesus Thy Son."[492]
The village razed.