In spite of the rigour of the laws, and in some manner owing to that very rigour, Protestants reappeared on all sides. Full of horror with respect to (Roman) Catholicism, they had feigned to embrace it under the sabres of the dragoons, and cursing the law which, by an infamous sacrilege, compelled them to receive the communion in the Church of Rome, although they did not believe in its dogmas,—shame, remorse, the desire of expiating the error they had committed, all served to reanimate their energy. They held meetings in the wilds, on the summit of mountains, in deep ravines, and vowed, in the name of God, to live and die in the Reformed faith. This opposition particularly manifested itself in Lower Languedoc, Vivarais, and Cevennes, which abounded in retreats almost inaccessible to the soldier. The principal events of our history are henceforth concentrated in those provinces. At the commencement of the French Reformation, the provinces around Paris took the first rank. Then came the turn of Béarn, Poitou, Guienne, and Saintonge. Next the Reformation was apparent only in the mountain-heights of Languedoc. The other provinces of the south followed the movement, but at a later period and with less lustre. The centre, the west, and the north long confined themselves to the silence of domestic worship. It will be observed also that the meetings of the Protestants at the end of the seventeenth century, and the opening of the eighteenth, presented a striking feature of resemblance to those of the first days of Farel and Calvin; for they comprised scarcely any but the poor, and people of low degree. The peasantry of Cevennes united with the artisans of Meaux; but the nobles, and the rich inhabitants, had abjured, or sought an asylum in foreign lands, and nearly all those who had neither fallen nor fled, secluded themselves from the rest. From 1559 to 1685 the French Reformation reckoned great families, who perhaps brought with them less religious vitality than political passions; after the Revocation, it again recruited itself from the popular masses, and gathered there a strength, a devotion, and a constancy, to which it had for some time been a stranger. Upon the news of these meetings, some of the pastors returned to France; and as they were not numerous enough for the task, they took assistants with them, who received the name of _preachers_. These were labourers, workmen, and shepherds, who without other preparation than their fervid zeal, rose in the meetings, and addressed pious exhortations to the audience, out of the abundance of their hearts. Some disorder of belief and conduct flowed from this, of which we shall have to speak.