The highroad, white with dust, unrolled like a ribbon through a rugged plain which lay southwest of Nîmes, stretching from the low range of limestone mountains--the foothills of the Cévennes--on the north to the salt marshes of the Mediterranean on the south. Rocks cropped up on either side of the road; the country was wild and barren-looking, although here and there were fig trees and vineyards, and farther west was the fertile valley of the Vaunage. North of those limestone hills lay the Cévennes, where since the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes the poor Huguenot peasants were making their desperate fight for liberty of conscience, against the might and the bigotry of Louis XIV. Their leader, Laporte, was dead, but he had been succeeded by Jean Cavalier and Roland, and revolt still raged in the caves and fastnesses of the upper Cévennes, though Maréchal Montrevel and the Intendant of Languedoc assured the king that they had wiped out the insurrection. But the “Barbets” or “Camisards,” as they were called in derision, though naming themselves “Enfants de Dieu,” kept up the fierce death-struggle. Meanwhile the city of Nîmes was judiciously orthodox in the presence of the dragoons, and many Huguenots went to mass rather than suffer torture and death. Not every man is made for a martyr, and there were terrors enough to awe the most heroic. The bodies of Protestants who died in prison were exposed at fairs for a fee, or dragged through the streets on hurdles to be burned, as a warning and example to the misguided who still lived. Yet the busy life of every day went on; people bought and sold and got gain; others married and made feasts; children were born, to be snatched from Huguenot parents and baptized into the old religion; some men died and were buried, others were cast from the galleys, at Marseilles, into the sea. Such was life in Nîmes in those old days when the sign of Two Shoes hung over the humble shop on the Rue St. Antoine. All this while le Bossu was trudging along the white road. He met many country people now, bringing their vegetables and poultry to town, and more than once he was saluted with the mocking cry, “Petit Bossu!” He kept steadily on, however, taking no heed, his face pale from the exertion, or the repression of his natural temper, which resented insults and injury more keenly than most people of his condition, in an age when the poor were as the beasts of the field to the upper classes. Many thoughts were passing in the hunchback’s mind, but he dwelt most upon the little blue slippers, and when he did, his brown eyes softened, the drawn expression on his thin face relaxed. “The _bon Dieu_ bless her,” he murmured; “to her I am not the hunchback or the cobbler--to her I am poor Charlot, her humble friend. _Ciel!_ I would die for mademoiselle.”