He desires you to go on paying attention thereto; he will think it a good idea to have most of the cavalry and officers quartered upon Protestants; if, according to the regular proportion, the religionists should receive ten, you can make them take twenty." The dragoons took up their quarters in peaceable families, ruining the more well-to-do, maltreating old men, women, and children, striking them with their sticks or the flat of their swords, hauling off Protestants in the churches by the hair of their heads, harnessing laborers to their own ploughs, and goading them like oxen.
Conversions became numerous in Poitou.

Those who could fly left France, at the risk of being hanged if the attempt happened to fail.

"Pray lay out advantageously the money you are going to have," wrote Madame de Maintenon to her brother, M.d'Aubigne.

"Land in Poitou is to be had for nothing, and the desolation amongst the Protestants will cause more sales still.

You may easily settle in grand style in that province." "We are treated like enemies of the Christian denomination," wrote, in 1662, a minister named Jurieu, already a refugee in Holland.