There were in Béarn ninety-six places of worship, and forty-six churches of residence. A lawsuit, which lasted seven years, reduced the number of places of worship to twenty, and fettered these in every possible way. It was nearly the same in all the provinces of the kingdom. If the council sometimes used precaution, and imposed upon the intendants some reserve, the pastor Claude presumes, in his _Plaintes des Protestants de France_, that it was to induce the belief that justice was regarded, and that the condemned churches had not good titles. The mind feels some relief, amidst these persecutions, in dwelling upon the paper wars which were fought at the same epoch between the most eminent pastors of the two religions. Here at least material violence did not intervene; here the contest was equal; and when men of great powers attacked the Reformation, it did not want solid and skilful champions for its defence. The Jansenists were so accustomed to the strife, that they could not desist from it; and peace having been concluded between them and the Jesuits, through the intermission of Clement IX., they turned their arms against the Huguenots. They imported into the conflict all the greater zeal, that they were themselves taxed with being no more than disguised Calvinists. Arnault and Nicole therefore published their famous _Perpétuité de la Foi sur l’Eucharistie_ (1664-1676), in which they endeavoured to establish, from the text of the Fathers of the Church, and by certificates brought from the East, that the dogma of the real presence has been at all times admitted in Christianity. Claude replied that they had wrongly interpreted the sense of the Fathers, and certificates procured from poor Greek popes by the ambassador of France, who was their protector against the Turks, were but of little value. His answer had extraordinary success; and the Jesuits themselves did their best to disseminate it, as Arnault complains in one of his letters, because they were quite as much interested in humiliating the Jansenists as in destroying the Reformed. Nicole re-entered the lists with his _Préjugés légitimes contre les Calvinistes_. His argumentation was sadly wanting in caution. He maintained that before quitting the Church of Rome, the meanest artisan is bound to assure himself of the authenticity of the holy writings, to compare the translations with the original, to examine all the various readings, to weigh all the interpretations of the texts, to compare them with the decisions of the councils, to perform in a word an immense labour that the most erudite dare hardly undertake. These arguments, every one knows, have been turned by Rousseau against (Roman) Catholicism and even against the Gospel. Claude, Jurieu, and Pajon answered Nicole.