About twenty years afterwards, during the troubles of the Fronde, the great Condé, counting upon the old associations of his house, sought to attract them to his standard, and employed emissaries, who sowed sinister rumours. They went from church to church, saying that the regent Anne d’Autriche, had promised the clergy that the Edict of Pacification should be revoked, that her first minister, Mazarin, was an Italian cardinal without good faith, that it was force alone which would preserve the Reformers from utter ruin, and that the Prince de Condé would guarantee full liberty of conscience and of worship. But these appeals were also fruitless. The people of La Rochelle took the side of the regent against their own governor. Those of Montauban exhausted their men and wealth for the same purpose. The town of Saint Jean d’Angély, which had nothing but dismantled walls, defended itself against the rebels. The province of the Vivarais and the Cevennes furnished devoted soldiers, and nearly all the Reformed nobility of the southern provinces, rising against the Prince de Condé, kept Languedoc, Saintonge, and a part of Guienne for the king. These services were of great importance; Mazarin said, “I have no cause to complain of the little flock; if they browse on bad herbage, at least they do not stray away.” When he mentioned the pastors of Montauban, he styled them his good friends, and the Count d’Harcourt said to the deputies of the same town, “The crown tottered on the king’s head, but you have fixed it there.” Louis XIV. expressed his gratitude more than once, but particularly in his declaration of the 21st of May, 1682, in which he said, “Forasmuch as our subjects of the pretended Reformed religion have given us proofs of their affection and fidelity, notably in the present circumstances, of which we rest well satisfied, we make known that for these causes they be maintained and guarded, as now we maintain and guard them, in the full and entire enjoyment of the Edict of Nantes.” But it was this very same king, who made those who had fixed the crown upon his head, to suffer the longest and the more odious persecutions! It was he who in 1685 signed the fatal Edict of Revocation! What were the causes of so many violences and misfortunes? We are about to enter on one of the most interesting problems of this history. The most implacable enemy of the Reformed was the spiritual power. In the foremost rank the Jesuits figured, who had purposely been created for the extirpation of Protestantism in Europe, the born adversaries of the Huguenots, monks doubly redoubtable by their office of confessors to kings, and because their code of morality authorized them the use of any and every means. Lying, deceit, iniquity, the traffic of consciences, brutal force, spoliations, exile, even murder,—all things were lawful, provided they only conduced to their ends.