At this point it becomes necessary to devote a few words to Jean Cavalier, the ablest commander of the Camisards. He was born at Ribaut, near Anduze, was the son of a labourer, had been a swineherd and then a baker's boy. He was short and stoutly built, had a big head, broad shoulders, and the neck of a bull. His eyes were blue, his hair long and fair. Sent as a boy to school, he was encouraged by his mother, a venomous Calvinist, to oppose and hate everything that savoured of Catholicism. Every evening, on his return from school, she sought to undo all the doctrinal teaching that had been given him there. His father, a Catholic, urged him to attend Mass; the boy refused. The persecution to which the Huguenots were subjected led him to quit the land at the age of sixteen, and he went to Geneva, where he resumed his occupation as a baker. Meeting a Cevenol refugee in the streets of Geneva, he was told that his mother had been imprisoned at Aigues-Mortes, and his father, as suspected, at Carcassonne. He determined to return to the Cévennes, and he crossed the frontier in 1702. He found that his father and mother had been released, she on promising conformity. He at once dissuaded her from attending Mass, and he succeeded equally with his father. A few days later occurred the murder of the arch-priest Du Chayla, at Pont-de-Montvert. Cavalier at once offered his hands to The Mower, and he speedily gathered about him a body of followers, and they secured arms by forcing the doors of the parsonage of S. Martin-de-Durfort, where was a collection of weapons, but no injury was done to the prior in charge there, who had taken no part in the persecution of the Calvinists. The area of insurrection extended through six dioceses, those of Mende, Alais, Viviers, Uzès, Nîmes and Montpellier—in fact, over the present departments of Lozère, Ardèche, Gard and Hérault.