A volley was poured in front and on both flanks, and from these three points it was closely responded to; and then the soldiers, who were in great force, began, at the bayonet's point, to push up the woody sides of the defile, firing as they went and driving the peasantry before them; and meanwhile the prophetess--she of the supposed charmed life, La Bonne Madelon, remained on her knees immovable, absorbed in prayer, half seen, half hidden, amid the eddying smoke. Guillot strove to lead her aside, but in vain; and when a bullet grazed his cheek, he rushed away to join his brother, who, like him, strongly believed in the power of immunity from death possessed by Madelon, and was now busy in the act of concentrating and directing the operations of his scattered followers. It is said that when the prophetess, whose eyes had in them the gleam of insanity, felt the bullets whiz about her, a sense of danger came with the sound, and that she opened her eyes and glanced about her, as if seeking to escape, but she was grasped by four soldiers of the line; and that when the Camisards beheld her feeble hands bound with cords, while her head sunk on her breast, and she was dragged away, they became for a time panic-stricken, and though they hovered on the precipice above the corpse-strewn defile, they ceased to fire, and gazed on her conveyance to the rear in a species of stupid wonder. 'She can save herself,' Cavalier is reported to have said, so perfect was his belief, as a credulous mountaineer, in her divine mission; 'we cannot rescue her now, but,' he added, lifting his cap and looking upward, 'some miracle from heaven will.' But no miracle was wrought, and with his solitary prisoner the Sieur de Montrevel marched down, somewhat triumphantly, to the nearest town, the white houses of which could be seen a league or two distant from the mountains. That night Guillot, with a chosen party, stole from them, and entered the silent street, from which all the inhabitants had fled, hoping to find some trace of the Good Madelon, perhaps in the public prison, from which they might see a way to free her. But Montrevel and his men had departed, leaving in the market-place a fearful object, which greeted the eyes of Guillot and his followers when daybreak came in. Suspended by the neck from a gibbet in the centre of the place hung the body of their prophetess in its well-known drapery, and literally full of bullets, as the departing Florentins had made a target of it. She had been a beautiful woman, whose husband and children had been cruelly destroyed before her, and sorrow had doubtless turned her brain. Accustomed though they had become to atrocities, the Camisards gazed at each other in horror at this spectacle, and then bore away her body for interment, sadly, slowly, and reverentially, and from the side of her grave went up the united vow for vengeance!