Cévennes Mountains (France); France -- Description and travel
Fléchier, a contemporary, thus describes the ecstasy of Isabeau
Charras, one of the principal prophetesses, and not to be confounded
with la belle Isabeau. He gives it from the relation of an ecclesiastic
who with some friends entered her cottage to see what really took place.
"Ils furent surpris du spectacle qui s'offrit à leurs yeux.
La prophétesse était couchée à la renverse dans une cuisine,
les jambes nues et l'estomac tout à fait découvert. Tous les
assistants, à genoux autour d'elle, étaient attentifs à ces
pieuses nudités. Le prêtre voulut faire quelque remontrance à la
fille, mais la mère indignée lui dit: 'Quoi! malheureux que tu
êtes, vous ne respectez pas ma fille qui a le Saint Esprit dans
l'estomac!'"
Gabriel Astier was finally taken and broken on the wheel in 1690.
François Vivens was a wool-comber of Valleraux, a small man and lame,
but with a robust and indefatigable body. He had gone to Holland, but,
on the accession of William to the English throne, felt so confident
that the Prince of Orange would bring all the power of his kingdom to
assist the Calvinists of Languedoc, that he returned thither. When he
arrived in the Cévennes he found the people agitated by the spirit of
prophecy. He was the first to organise rebellion. He exhorted to it,
and collected arms, manufactured powder, and cast bullets. He soon had
four hundred men under arms, and he met Bâville and de Broglie near
Florac at the head of a considerable body. A fight ensued. Vivens was
obliged to fly and hide in a wood; he lost three men killed, and some
prisoners, who were hung next day.
Bâville executed several persons charged with having given him
shelter. To revenge this Vivens, with his own hand, killed the curé of
Conguérac, and had the priest of S. Marcel and the vicaire stabbed and
four officers assassinated, either in their houses or on the roads.
"This Cevenol," says Peyrat in his _Histoire des Pasteurs du Desert_,
"had in his soul something of the Tishbite who had four hundred and
fifty of the prophets of Baal slain by the brook of Carmel."
Whilst Vivens was ordering these bloody reprisals he was carrying on
a correspondence with Schomberg, late Marshal of France, who was at
this time in Savoy in command of a regiment of refugee Protestants.
He proposed to Schomberg a plan. He was to raise an army of several
thousands, make a sudden descent on Aigues-Mortes, march across
the plain, and join hands with the Cevenols. The correspondence was
intercepted, and Bâville, seeing he had to do with a dangerous man, put
a price on his head.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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