Page:Elizabeth Fry (Pitman 1884).djvu/112

104 because the known violence of the desperadoes whom she visited, she inspected the Maison Centrale, containing about 1,200 prisoners. She interceded for some of them that they might be released from their fetters, undertaking at the same time that the released prisoners should behave well. At a subsequent visit, after holding a religious service among these felons, the same men thanked her with tears of gratitude.

Much to her delight, she discovered a body of religionists who held principles similar to those of the Society of Friends. They were descendants of the Camisards, a sect of Protestants who took refuge in the mountains of the Cevennes during the persecution which followed the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and were descended originally from the Albigenses. Their three most distinguished pastors were Claude Brousson, who took part in the sufferings at the general persecution of the Protestants; Jean Cavalier, the soldier-pastor who led his flock to battle, and who now sleeps in an English grave-yard; and Antoine Court, who formed this "Church in the desert," into a more compact body. The first of these pastors was hanged for "heresy" at Montpellier in 1698; but he, together with his successors, laboured so devoutly and so ardently, that the persecuted remnant rose from the dust and proved themselves valiant for the truth as they had received and believed it. It was not possible that the seed of a people which had learnt the sermons preached to them off by heart, and written the texts on stone tablets, in order to pass them from one mountain village to another, could ever die out. The descendants of those martyrs had come down through long generations, to flourish at last openly in Nismes.