happy homesteads nothing was left: the hamlets, with their barns and
outhouses, the isolated farmhouses, the single huts and cottages, every
species of building in short, disappeared before the swift advancing
flames as wild flowers, weeds, and roots fall before the ploughshare."

This destruction was accompanied by horrible cruelty. For instance,
twenty-five inhabitants of a certain village took refuge in a chateau;
the number consisted of children and very old people, and they were all
that was left of the entire population. Palmerolle, in command of the
miquelets, hearing of this, hastened thither, seized the first eight he
could lay hold of, and shot them on the spot, "to teach them," as he says
in his report, "not to choose a shelter which was not on the list of
those permitted to them."

The Catholics also of St. Florent, Senechas, Rousson, and other parishes,
becoming excited at seeing the flames which enveloped the houses of their
old enemies, joined together, and arming themselves with everything that
could be made to serve as an instrument of death, set out to hunt the
conscripts down; they carried off the flocks of Perolat, Fontareche, and
Pajolas, burned down a dozen houses at the Collet-de-Deze, and from there
went to the village of Brenoux, drunk with the lust of destruction.
There they massacred fifty-two persons, among them mothers with unborn
children; and with these babes, which they tore from them, impaled on
their pikes and halberts, they continued their march towards the villages
of St. Denis and Castagnols.

Very soon these volunteers organised themselves into companies, and
became known under the name of Cadets de la Croix, from a small white
cross which they wore on their coats; so the poor Huguenots had a new
species of enemy to contend with, much more bloodthirsty than the