Cavalier and his men by a night attack, drove them to Nages, a village some twelve miles south-west of Nîmes, and there defeated them with great loss. Cavalier lost four hundred of his men, and a few days later the survivors were wiped out by La Lande in the woods of Yeuset near Montpézat, north of the Ardèche. The crowning disaster was the betrayal to the French general of Cavalier's stores of arms and provisions and his hospital in the caverns of the mountains of the Vivarais. The position was hopeless, the aid promised by England never came, and Villars, who had succeeded Montrevel, arrived at Nîmes in April 1704 with fresh troops and determined to end the war somehow.

We now reach the point of psychological interest, the catastrophe of this grim tragedy, and that is the split between the Camisard leaders and the widely different actions of Roland and Cavalier in the face of these disasters. Cavalier was convinced that it was useless to continue fighting and that the only thing to do was to make the best terms they could. He had an interview with Roland, who seems to have given a conditional assent to opening negotiations with Villars. Cavalier succeeded in obtaining the following terms from Villars: liberty of conscience provided no temples were built, the release of Protestant prisoners, and the return of the refugees provided they took an oath of fidelity to the King, seven years' relief from taxes for those whose houses had been burnt, and leave for Cavalier to raise a regiment from the men still with him on condition that they laid down their arms. The agreement was signed on May 17, 1704, by Villars and de Baville, Cavalier and Billard. Cavalier was to receive a commission as Colonel with 1500 livres a year as pay.

Cavalier now had to secure the assent of Roland and the other leaders of the Camisards. An interview was arranged, but it proved a dismal failure. Roland declined to have anything to do with the agreement, and declared that the Court could not be trusted; and he was perfectly right, for the ink on the agreement was scarcely dry before it was repudiated. The King would not hear of it, and Villars had to explain to the Court that he had had no intention of granting liberty of conscience. Cavalier returned to his negotiations with

Villars, while Roland proceeded to cut up another detachment of the Royal troops.

Villars was now determined to win over Cavalier. He renewed his offer of a commission, and made arrangements for Cavalier to go to Versailles to put the Protestant case to the King in person. At the interview the King listened patiently to Cavalier till he spoke of the agreement with Villars, when the King broke off the discussion and declined to hear anything about it. A few days later Cavalier was given the promised payment of 1500 livres and a commission as Colonel, and after being entertained by Chamillart at St Cloud returned to his men at Macon. Here he had secret information from 'une jeune dame de la ville avec laquelle j'étais souvent en rapport' that his life was in danger, and learnt from a friend that it was intended to intern him in the fortress of Brisach on the Rhine. Cavalier at once made up his mind to leave France, and at this point his connexion with the war in the Cévennes ended. The rest of his life was a separate romance. He fought in Italy under Stahremberg in the service of the Duke of Savoy for a year or more, then went to Berne and from Berne to the Hague, where every one made much of him as the hero of the Cévennes, and he was commissioned to raise a regiment at the cost of England and the United Provinces. He arrived with his men in England in 1706, sailed for France with Shovel but was diverted to Spain, where his regiment was cut to pieces by the French under Berwick at Almanza, and Cavalier was left for dead on the field with a dozen wounds; but the indomitable little man managed to escape, and after serving the Duke of Savoy again in an attempted invasion of Provence retired to the newly established settlement of Protestant refugees at Portarlington in Ireland. Here he married Mlle de Ponthieu, a la Rochfoucauld on her mother's side, and spent the next twenty-eight years of his life as a half-pay colonel. At length his services were recognised. In 1735 he was made a brigadier; in 1738, Governor of Jersey; and in 1739, Major-General. But he was a broken man. He crossed to England in 1740 to take the waters, but died that year and was buried at St Luke's, Chelsea.

Cavalier's career was as extraordinary as that of any

of Napoleon's Field Marshals. The son of a small peasant-farmer, born in November 1681, a shepherd lad, then a baker's apprentice, imperfectly educated, without the least military experience, and little more than a boy, he maintained for two years and a half a desperate guerilla warfare against the forces of the Crown commanded by two Field Marshals, one of them Villars, reputed (according to Saint Simon quite wrongly) to be the best soldier in France. Baville, in the bill announcing the reward offered for the capture of Cavalier, described him as a sturdy little man, his face scarred with sword cuts, with a gentle rather dreamy air, a soft voice and rather taciturn; his hair was a pale chestnut; he was light in the leg and rather knock-kneed-the description suggests a light-weight boxer, and Cavalier must have possessed unusual ability and endurance to have stood all this scrimmaging in the mountains, hairbreadth escapes and hiding in caves in midwinter. His courage and address were extraordinary. On one occasion he was pursued on horse-back by three dragoons. Finding they were gaining on him, he turned in his tracks, shot dead the leading dragoon as he came up, the second as he attacked him, and the third as he ran away. His 'Mémoires' convince me of the depth of his Protestant convictions and the sincerity of his hatred of what he called 'les Simagrées de la messe.' Where he differed from Roland was in a certain cold-blooded detachment which enabled him to weigh chances dispassionately, and the conclusion I come to from his Mémoires' is that he gave up the war not because he had lost faith in the justice of his cause, but because his matured judgment convinced him that it was useless and hopeless to go on fighting. In other words, he was a realist where Roland was an idealist, but his action was never forgiven. Though he was the backbone of the rising in the wide district of the Lower Cévennes, it is Roland not Cavalier who is the hero of the war. The doubt that existed as to Cavalier's motives was never removed. His late associates must have thought he had done very well for himself with his 1500 livres from Louis XIV, his Commission as Colonel in the forces of the Duke of Savoy, his reception by England and the United Provinces, and then that final turn of fortune at the end of thirty-five

6

years, when all the other leaders of the Camisards had died violent deaths, and while the Tower of Constance at Aigues Mortes still imprisoned those who suffered for conscience' sake. I think they did him an injustice, and the treaty that he negotiated with Villars might have ended the war had it not been for the intolerable obstinacy of Louis XIV and the cruel bigotry of the Roman Catholic clergy. But Cavalier did not die fighting to the last, and Roland did, and that is why Roland is still regarded almost as a Saint.

Roland was the nephew of that Gideon Laporte who was one of Cavalier's most trusted lieutenants, but he dropped the name of Laporte and was always known as Roland. He was born Jan. 3, 1680, at Mas-Soubeyran near Mialet, north of Anduze, in the house that is now the Musée du Desert. The scurrilous editor of the 'Précis Historique' sneers at his origin, but Cavalier says that he belonged to a good family living at Mialet in the Cévennes, had received a good education; and that he was living at Nîmes in 1702 when he heard of the rising farther north, and sent word to Cavalier that he would join him. Roland, however, always maintained his own seniority and independent action, and Court says that the three first leaders of the Camisards were Gideon Laporte, Castanet, and Roland, and that Roland had some military experience. Il avoit la taille avantageuse, l'air ferme et élevé. It étoit actif intrépide, infatigable, et plein du zéle pour tout ce qui avoit du rapport à la Religion dans laquelle il étoit né.' A stark fighter of iron will and immovable conviction, he seems to have belonged to a rather different social stratum from that of Cavalier. Roland's one weakness seems to have been personal vanity. He is said to have signed himself 'nous Comte et Seigneur Roland Généralissime des Protestants de France' when he ordered the inhabitants of S. André de Valboigne to expel all priests on pain of being burnt alive, and Cavalier in his 'Mémoire' sneers at his 'Comté,' 'le laissant dans son Comté, c'est à dire dans la montagne.' The fact was that Roland claimed the leadership from the first, and that the various troops commanded by Cavalier, Roland, Castanet, Laporte, Ravanel and others worked independently as well as in concert, but in the latter case it was always

by arrangement, and the question of seniority did not arise till after Cavalier's negotiations with Villars. Probably Roland's most brilliant exploit was his total defeat of the Royal troops in the Plain de Fond Morte, when he killed the Colonel, most of the officers, and over 200 men with a loss of four killed and five wounded. So far as fighting went there was little to choose between him and Cavalier; the wide difference between the two men only appears in the final stages of the war. Cavalier, after coming to an agreement with Villars as to the terms of peace, undertook to bring Roland into line, and met him at Anduze. The story is told in full and with dramatic detail by Antoine Court, who claimed to have had it from eye-witnesses. Cavalier at first tried persuasion, but finding Roland obdurate, sought to force his hand by asserting his authority. Roland told him bluntly that his head had been turned by Villars' offers, and that as for authority he was Cavalier's senior. The two men had to be parted by the Camisard prophets, and Cavalier returned to the Camisard forces under Ravanel at Calvisson, a few miles south-west of Nîmes. Here he was very badly received. Ravanel became extremely violent and abusive and taunted Cavalier with treachery. The latter thereupon offered to test the personal loyalty of the men by going down the ranks; but he was received with cries of 'Coward' and 'Traitor,' and the regiment marched off under Ravanel, and though Cavalier made a last desperate attempt to reclaim his men, only twenty followed him out of a total, as returned by Cavalier to Villars, of 712 men, sixteen captains, sixteen lieutenants, and a quartermaster.

Villars made one more effort to come to terms with the Camisards. He sent the prophet Salomon back from Nîmes to Roland with the offer of a commission and pay of 1200 livres, which Roland at once declined. Villars then appealed to the leading Protestants of the towns to endeavour to persuade Roland to accept an amnesty. A deputation was sent to Roland, who told them that if they came near him again he would shoot the lot; but in spite of this threat he sent a messenger to Villars that he would consider negotiations. With the Baron d'Aiguliers and two deputies, Cavalier met Roland and Ravanel, who received him with violent abuse. The