In later years, Louis XIII.’s Minister was ready enough to tax these suffering millions for the sake of absolutism and glory; but the young Bishop of Luçon, not yet hardened by power, touched by the piteous sight of thin hands worn by toil, the bread snatched from them by those who made an unfair living out of the taxes, wrote to head-quarters at Poitiers more than one letter of strong remonstrance, letters in which a warm indignation pierces through the studied courtesy of the words. He writes of “the misery of the place, the poverty of the people, the excessive tax of the _taille_ which they have paid till now....” He begs that the load they have to bear may be lightened. He reminds the officials that their own town pays much less than it ought, and hints very plainly that unless things are voluntarily set right, he will call the higher powers of justice to his aid. As one would naturally expect, the _traitants_ of Poitiers, worthy forerunners of the farmers-general of a later century, took very little notice of the appeal or the veiled threat of M. de Luçon--a young fellow, a “new broom,” who might as well mind his own ecclesiastical business and let the King’s taxes alone. But he was as good as his word. Two months later he wrote to the Minister of Finance, the all-powerful Sully, to lay the grievances of his flock before him; the appeal being seconded by his courtier brother, Henry de Richelieu. Thus the Poitevin tax-gatherers had a taste of Richelieu’s quality. The spiritual needs of the diocese were quite as crying and as serious. Religious matters all over France were in a terrible state, and nowhere worse than in Bas-Poitou. “Error and vice were rampant,” says a writer of the time. Where the Church was concerned, Christianity seemed extinct; and Huguenot zeal had died down into political discontent. Church property was misused, wasted on pensions to princes and courtiers; the bishops were worldly and non-resident, the monasteries were scandalously corrupt, and their revenues often in lay hands; the parish clergy were ignorant and poor, and the long civil wars had made havoc with the churches; many had been desecrated, put to profane uses, if not destroyed altogether. It was only forty or fifty years since the “Monk” Richelieu and men like him had stormed over Poitou, and the memory of his exploits was still green. The consequence of all this was a state of morals and civilisation which has been described by Michelet--not without exaggeration, possibly--in his terrible chapters on witchcraft in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Dark and cruel superstitions haunting the God-forsaken villages; horrible Mumbo-Jumbo rites, relics of heathenism, performed on lonely heaths or in the shadow of the forests; families in which black magic and sorcery were handed down from father to son, from mother to daughter--such were the discoveries lying in wait for any active bishop who visited his diocese in the year 1609.