In Languedoc, in Dauphiny, and in the southern provinces generally, men and women who professed Protestantism were liable to be hanged or sent to the galleys, down to nearly the end of the last century. A Protestant pastor who exercised his vocation did so at the daily peril of his life. Nothing in the shape of a Protestant congregation was permitted to exist, and if Protestants worshipped together, it was in secret, in caves, in woods, among the hills, or in the "Desert." Yet Protestantism nevertheless contrived to exist through this long dark period of persecution, and even to increase. And when at length it became tolerated, towards the close of the last century, the numbers of its adherents appeared surprising to those who had imagined it to be altogether extinct. Indeed, looking at the persistent efforts made by Louis XIV. to exterminate the Huguenots, and to the fact that many hundred thousand of the best of them emigrated into foreign countries, while an equal number are supposed to have perished in prison, on the scaffold, at the galleys, and in their attempts to escape, it may almost be regarded as matter of wonder that the Église Reformée--the Church of the old Huguenots--should at the present day number about a thousand congregations, besides the five hundred Lutheran congregations of Alsatia, and that the Protestants of France should amount, in the whole, to about two millions of souls. CHAPTER III. VAL LOUISE--HISTORY OF FELIX NEFF. Some eight miles south of Briançon, on the road to Fort Dauphin, a little river called the Gyronde comes down from the glaciers of Mont Pelvoux, and falls into the Durance nearly opposite the village of La Bessie. This river flows through Val Louise, the entrance into which can be discerned towards the northwest. Near the junction of the rivers, the ruins of an embattled wall, with entrenchments, are observed extending across the valley of the Durance, a little below the narrow pass called the "Pertuis-Rostan," evidently designed to close it against an army advancing from the south. The country people still call those ruins the "Walls of the Vaudois;"[101] and according to tradition a great Vaudois battle was fought there; but of any such battle history makes no mention. [Footnote 101: A gap in the mountain-wall to the left, nearly over La Bessie, is still known as "La Porte de Hannibal," through which, it is conjectured, that general led his army. But opinion, which is much divided as to the route he took, is more generally in favour of his marching up the Isère, and passing into Italy by the Little St. Bernard.]