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Casaubon about the Vaudois clergy, Sir James betook himself to Celia, and talked to her about her sister; spoke of a house in town, and asked whether Miss Brooke disliked London.
In features, dress, habits, names, language, and religious doctrine, they have an almost perfect identity with the Vaudois of Piedmont at the present day. Dormilhouse consists of about forty cottages, inhabited by some two hundred persons. The cottages are perched "like eagles' nests," one tier ranging over another on the rocky ledges of a steep mountain-side.
The country people still call those ruins the "Walls of the Vaudois;" and according to tradition a great Vaudois battle was fought there; but of any such battle history makes no mention. But opinion, which is much divided as to the route he took, is more generally in favour of his marching up the Isère, and passing into Italy by the Little St.
It sometimes, however, happened, that the persecution waxed hotter on one side of the Cottian Alps, while it temporarily relaxed on the other; and on such occasions the French and Italian Vaudois were accustomed to cross the mountain passes, and take refuge in each others' valleys.
Before the German auxiliaries arrived, the French had made great progress in their conquests. Catinat besieged and took Villa-Franca, Nice, and some other fortifications; then he reduced Villana and Carmagnola, and detached the marquis de Feuquieres to invest Coni, a strong fortress garrisoned by the Vaudois and French refugees. The duke of Savoy was now reduced to the brink of ruin.
The place was, indeed, so intimately identified with the past sufferings and triumphs of the Vaudois, and it was, besides, so centrally situated, and so secure, that they came to regard its possession as essential to the success of their enterprise.
Such was the land of the Vaudois; the predestined abode of God's Church during the long and gloomy period of Anti-christ's reign. It was the ark in which the one elect family of Christendom was to be preserved during the flood of error that was to come upon the earth.
The old baron alone felt its effects. He was severely reprimanded for having so ill fulfilled his paternal duties." The good burghers of Berne the Lords as they called themselves were in fact very hard with all their Vaudois subjects. "Equally merciless to the vanities and the vices, they confounded luxury and drunkenness in their rules, pleasures and bad manners.
The Marquis himself then wrote to the Vaudois, offering them terms on the above basis, but threatening, in case of refusal, that every man of them would be hung. Arnaud's reply was heroic. "We are not subjects," he said, "of the King of France; and that monarch not being master of this country, we can enter into no treaty with his servants.
But even granting that this entrance should be forced, as it sometimes was, there were ample means within the mountains themselves, which were but a congeries of fortresses, for prolonging the contest. The valleys abound with gorges and narrow passages, where one man might maintain the way against fifty. There were, too, escarpments of rock, with galleries and caves known only to the Vaudois.
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