The pope was far more tolerant in his desires for dealing with the French Protestants, than was the quartette at Versailles. The liberal spirit of the Gallican Church was ignored to feed the contemptible ambition of the converted Françoise d’Aubigné, and to lull to rest the conscience of the pusillanimous nonentity still called the King of France. The persecution of the Huguenots was carried on relentlessly for fifteen years; fire and sword, and rape and murder, were the lot of those who remained to brave the booted emissaries of M. Louvois, if they retaliated where they had the chance, and as they did fiercely in the terrible struggles in the Cévennes. Justice is even-handed: it was no time to turn the cheek to be smitten. Those who emigrated, as in such thousands they did, carried with them the commerce and the prosperity of France. Frugal and industrious for the most part, and in these later days at least, peacefully disposed, rarely seeking more than to be let alone, they were the mainstay of the country. Richelieu had fully recognised their value, and followed it in his policy with them. The “Old Woman of Versailles,” as she was widely called, reversed the great cardinal’s provisions, and in time the avengement fell. The clergy generally carried out the orders issued from Versailles for the extermination of the heretics. Monseigneur d’Orléans and the Abbé de Fénelon alone resisted. The first afforded time for the Huguenots to make their preparations for emigrating from France, by lodging the soldiery, sent to disperse them by violence, in his own palace, and maintaining them at his own expense, forbidding them meanwhile to harm any one of the Huguenot families in his diocese. For Monsieur de Fénelon, selected to superintend the raid of the _booted missionaries_ in Poitou and Saintonge, he, like the Bishop of Orléans, forbade them to use violence, and brought back more of the errant ones into the Catholic fold by his sweet, persuasive eloquence, than the rest of the priests did, with all their _dragonnades_ and executioner assistants, notwithstanding the view of Madame de Maintenon and of her spiritual director: that if only the holy Apostles had employed such emissaries of fire and sword, the Christian religion would not have been half so long in establishing. CHAPTER XXII Mademoiselle de L’Enclos’ _Cercle_—Madeleine de Scudéri—The Abbé Dubois—“The French Calliope,” and the Romance of her Life—“_Revenons à nos Moutons_”—A Resurrection?—Racine and his Detractors—“Esther”—_Athalie_ and St Cyr—Madame Guyon and the Quietists.