It is not my intention to do more than touch upon the religious wars of
the Cevennes. Those blood-stained chronicles have been given again and
again elsewhere. No one, however, can make a sojourn at Mende without
recalling the atrocities perpetrated in the name of religion, and
compared to which the excesses of the Jacquerie and the Terror sink
into insignificance. If any of my readers doubt this, let them turn to
the impartial pages of the eminent French historian, the late M. Henri
Martin; or, to take a shorter road to conviction, get up the history of
the Gevaudan, or of this same little town of Mende.

On a smaller scale, the horrors of the siege of Magdeburgh were here
repeated, the Tilly of the campaign being the Calvinist leader Merle.

Devastated in turn by Catholic and Protestant, Royalist and Huguenot,
Mende was taken by assault on Christmas Day, 1579, and during three
days given up to fire, pillage, and slaughter. A general massacre took
place; the cathedral was fired and partially destroyed, the bells,
thirteen in number--one of these called the 'Nonpareil,' and reputed
the most sonorous in Christendom--being melted down for cannon. All
that fiendish cruelty and the demon of destruction could do was done.
In vain Henry of Navarre tried to put down atrocities committed in his
name. A second time Merle possessed himself of Mende, only consenting
to go forth on payment of a large sum in gold.

The history of Mende is the history of Marvejols, of one town after
another visited by the traveller in the Cevennes; and in the wake of
the burnings, pillagings and massacres of that horrible period follows
the more horrible period still of the guerilla warfare of the
Camisards, quelled by means of the rack, the stake, and the wheel.