'It brings us troops, Guillot--troops, who will help us to beat those of Montrevel,' replied Jean, referring to the expedition consisting of thirty-five British and twelve Dutch ships of the line, which was to sail on the 1st of July, 1703, from St. Helens, to the assistance of the Cevennois, and to the arrival of this expedition off the coast the elder Cavalier looked confidently forward to repulsing the column of De Montrevel, while Roland was fighting the King's troops elsewhere. And now to explain briefly what brought all these affairs about. In the 'Histoire des Pasteurs du Désert,' and other annals, we are told the terrible story of that Civil War in which 30,000 Cevennois perished in battle or on the scaffold, between November, 1702, and December, 1704. Well fitted for desultory warfare are the mountains of Cevennes, with their rocky labyrinth of deep gorges and dark defiles, which a mere handful of bold peasantry were able to hold against the best troops of Louis XIV., and where, to this hour, the population is almost entirely Protestant, inhabiting some six hundred villages, which are all but inaccessible. The white-shirted Camisards had these steep ridges to encamp on; gorges for ambuscades; forests to rally in; paths trodden only by the wolf or the fox to retreat by; and caverns which became their arsenals and fortresses. Army after army came to annihilate these peasants as heretics, after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, but only to be destroyed or hurled in ruin and defeat into the valleys; but the miseries of the war, the slaughter of women and children, the burning and pillaging were fearful, and spread from thence to the ocean on the south, and the Rhone on the east, among the hundred churches of Dauphine. With much sublime piety and heroic valour the armed peasantry, as in the similar case of the Scottish Covenanters, combined a great amount of psalm-singing and the strongest religious fervour, bordering at times upon fanaticism, and prophets and prophetesses, like La Bonne Madelon, roused a wildness of enthusiasm never seen in France since the days of Joan of Arc. 'The spirit of resistance began to show itself, drawn forth by the recital of their wrongs, the denunciation of their tyrants, and the assurance of support from heaven; conventicles were held, in spite of the terrors of prison, torture, and the soldiery, and in the open air among the rocks and caverns.'