Madame de Maintenon thus wrote on the 13th of August, 1684: “The king is prepared to do everything that shall be judged useful for the welfare of religion. This undertaking will cover him with glory before God and man.” Glory! She did not foresee that, far from increasing the glory of Louis, the Edict of Revocation would impress an indelible stain upon his reign, and that posterity would inquire whether he had not, by this single act, more injured the material power and the policy of France than he had benefited it by his conquest of Flanders, Alsatia, and Franche-Comté. In the month of May, 1685, the clergy held a general assembly, and complimented the king upon the admirable success, which had attended his efforts to extirpate heresy. Louis was extolled above the greatest princes of Christian antiquity. The bishop of Valence and the coadjutor of Rouen said, “he had found the (Roman) Catholic church cast down and enslaved; but he had re-established it by his zeal; he had _without violence and without arms_ induced all rational persons to abandon heresy, had subdued their minds by winning their hearts with his favours, and had led back wanderers, who _would perchance never have returned to the bosom of the Church, had it not been for the flowery path he had thrown open to them_.” We copy these words as they were actually spoken, and will add nothing to them! Rulhières, who was permitted to search the state papers, when speaking of the intervention of the priests in the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, says, “I hold in my hands a collection of the letters of the clergy, some of which cause me to shudder.” XVII. Troops had been encamped in Béarn, in 1685, to watch the movements of the Spanish army; and as Spain had sought a truce, Louvois, mindful of the plan adopted by Marillac in Poitou, obtained the king’s permission to despatch some regiments to the districts inhabited by the Huguenots. The Marquis de Boufflers, commander of the troops, and the intendant Foucault received, in July, the order to complete the conversion of the Béarnese. The latter brought a refined and systematic cruelty to his task, and perfected more than one species of torture. This was the recommencement of the _dragonnades_, which were soon to spread over all France. Foucault announced that the king commanded all the Huguenots to return to the (Roman) Catholic unity, and to make a beginning of the business, drove some hundreds of Béarnese into a church by force, where the bishop of Lescar officiated. The doors were closed, and the unfortunate people were made to kneel by the force of blows, in order to receive the bishop’s absolution from heresy: they were then admonished that if they returned to the Protestant church, they would be punished for relapsing.