The son of this Sieur, Pompée de Grasse, was more zealous even than his father, and did not confine himself to threats. He placed sword-edge and firebrand at the disposal of the Huguenot cause. He was a terror to the whole countryside. At last, one night, when he was at Bormes, in the Maures, a party of Catholics, disguised in long cloaks, managed to get into his castle, and killed him and his brother, and set fire to the place. His widow, Susanne de Villeneuve, and her two daughters, were allowed to escape by boat to Hyères.
We are vastly mistaken if we regard the parties in the Wars of Religion as all Lamb on one side, and all Wolf on the other. As a matter of fact, except in the Cevennes, the Reform was favoured only by the lesser nobility, not out of religious conviction, but out of a spirit of turbulence bred by the long disorders of the English occupation of Aquitaine, and the riots of the Free Companies. They resented the firm hand imposed on them by the Crown, and they hoped to get pickings out of Church estates.
The people generally were not touched by the negatives of Calvinism. After that Henry IV. joined the Church, most of the nobility and country gentry followed his example—again, not from conviction, but because they saw that the game of resistance was up.
At present, in the department of Var there are 1,500 Protestants out of a population of 310,000. In Alpes Maritimes they number 1,000 out of nearly 294,000, and most of these sectaries are foreign importations. If there had been deep-rooted convictions, these would not have been dissipated so certainly. In the Cevennes, Calvinism holds on notwithstanding persecution in the past, and in Ireland is a reverse instance.
In 1592 the Duke of Savoy was at Grasse, and resolved on chastising this Susanne as a capital influence among the Razats. Actually two women at this period fomented the fury and bloodshed of internecine strife. The Baron de Vins, head of the Leaguers, had been killed in 1589 outside Grasse. The Countess Christine de Sault, his sister-in-law, had been the headpiece, as he the arm, of the party, and it was she who, in desperate resolve to save the Catholic cause, invited Charles Emmanuel of Savoy to give his help against the king. What she was on one side, that was Susanne de Villeneuve on the other—implacable, fanatical, remorseless in hate, and with an iron will.