who were left, and did not intend to recant, fled for concealment to the woods.
I left the home of my childhood, never to return to it, about midnight. I took with me about five hundred francs, which was all the ready money I had, two good horses, upon one of which I rode myself, and my valet was mounted upon the other, with a portmanteau containing a few necessaries. I was well armed, and I had resolved, if I should encounter dragoons, to sell my life as dearly as possible.
My house was amply furnished, and I had removed nothing from it. It was taken possession of by eighteen dragoons in two hours after I quitted it; they lived there until they had consumed or sold every thing they could lay their hands upon, even to the bolts and locks of the doors.
I passed through Coses about three o'clock in the morning, and found dragoons were still there. They had made all
than seven hundred were destroyed even before the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
The last measure adopted was that which has been known by the name of dragooning,[a] and if we had not the most undoubted testimony on the subject, it would be impossible to believe that such horrors could have been perpetrated under the mask of the Christian religion.
A day was appointed for the conversion of a certain district, and the dragoons made their appearance accordingly; they took possession of the Protestants' houses, destroyed all that they could not consume or carry away, turned the parlors into stables for their horses, treated the owners of the houses with every species of cruelty, depriving them of food, beating them, burning some alive, half-roasting others, and then letting them go, tying mothers securely to posts, and leaving their sucking infants to perish at their feet, hanging some upon hooks in the chimneys, and smoking them with wisps of wet straw till they were suffocated; some they dipped in wells; others they bound down, and poured wine into them through funnels, until reason was destroyed; and many other tortures were inflicted, some even more horrible than the above-named.↑ We believe that the use of the word dragoon, as a verb, implying, to abandon to the rage of the soldiery, is actually derived from the cruelties practised during these persecutions.
