Protestantism in France From Death of Henry IV to the Revolution - James Aitken Wylie

When the king and the Jesuits learned that the
Protestants had begun again to perform their
worship, they broke out into a transport of wrath
that was speedily quenched in blood. More arrests,
more dragoons, more sentences to the galleys,
more scaffolds; such were the means by which they
sought to crush the "Church of the Desert."
Everywhere in Languedoc and Dauphine the troops
were on the alert for the Reformed.
"It was a chase," as Voltaire has expressed it,
"in a wide ring." The Marquis de la Trousse, who
commanded in the Cevennes, when he surprised a
congregation, made his soldiers fire into it as if it
was a covey of game. The Protestants had no arms,
and could offer no resistance. They dropped on
their knees, and raising their hands to heaven,
awaited death.
The truthful Antoine Court says that "he was
furnished with an exact list of assemblies
massacred in different places, and that in some of
these encounters from 300 to 400 old men, women,
and children were left dead upon the spot."[3] But
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