They were not capable of much resistance. The brothers Rohan and Soubise, with their friends, had no regular army to oppose the King of France and his fifty thousand men. A recent treaty between France and England had deprived them of Charles I.’s possible help, and Richelieu’s movements were far too quick for Spain. By the middle of May the royal armies had poured like a devastating torrent over Languedoc and part of Guienne, destroying the green crops, the growing corn, all the year’s food of the strong little towns and villages, and driving the scattered people to the mountains. Every detail of the campaign was planned by Richelieu, and it was he who arranged that the King himself should escape the early summer heats by crossing the Cévennes to the Tarn country and carrying out there the general scheme of destruction. The first step in the campaign was the decisive one, and cost more to both sides than all the rest. Privas on its high ridge, the gallant little stronghold of the Vivarais, seventeen years earlier the seat of a general Protestant Synod, was now called upon literally to give its life for the cause. After a fortnight’s fighting siege, during which many lives were lost, the inhabitants and the garrison insisted that their brave commander, St. André de Montbrun, should make terms with the King. These were refused, and the surrender had to be unconditional. Town and people were treated with terrible severity. Both besiegers and besieged have been blamed for a furious fire which broke out as the royal troops were entering the fortress; in the awful night of confusion and massacre that followed, Privas was sacked and burnt to the ground with every circumstance of savagery. At such times Louis XIII. was hard and inflexible. He would have hanged St. André, had not the Cardinal intervened to save him. Indeed, on this occasion and others, Richelieu showed a humanity for which most writers have given him little credit. Towards political offenders he was indeed “the Iron Cardinal”--no mercy for those who came in the way of his great designs; but he had pity on the helpless fugitives of Privas. He was ill in bed on the fatal night of May 29. “But in spite of his illness,” writes Aubery, “having mounted his horse with two hundred gentlemen, he went himself to meet the crowd of inhabitants who had forsaken their homes and their goods; and among others he saved twelve young girls from sixteen to eighteen years old, caused them to be led in safety to the Château d’Autremont, and recommended them with much charity to the Lady of that place, who took great care of them. Afterwards one brought to him an infant of seven months, found in the arms of his dead mother; and having praised and rewarded the soldier for saving from among the dead him who had but begun to live, he gave the child a nurse, and commanded that he should be well brought up and should be called Fortunat de Privas....”