Early Life
His father, an illiterate peasant, had been compelled by persecution to become a Roman Catholic along with his family, but his mother brought him up secretly in the Protestant faith. In his boyhood he became a shepherd, and about his twentieth year he was apprenticed to a baker. Threatened with prosecution for his religious opinions he went to Geneva, where he spent the year 1701; he returned to the Cévennes on the eve of the rebellion of the Camisards, who by the murder of the Abbé du Chayla at Pont-de-Monvert on the night of July 24, 1702 raised the standard of revolt. Some months later he became their leader. He showed himself possessed of an extraordinary genius for war, and Marshal Villars paid him the high compliment of saying that he was as courageous in attack as he was prudent in retreat, and that by his extraordinary knowledge of the country he displayed in the management of his troops a skill as great as that of the ablest officers. Within a period of two years he was to hold in check Count Victor Maurice de Broglie and Marshal Montrevel, generals of Louis XIV, and to carry on one of the most terrible partisan wars in French history.
Read more about this topic: Jean Cavalier
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early and/or life:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“We have been told over and over about the importance of bonding to our children. Rarely do we hear about the skill of letting go, or, as one parent said, “that we raise our children to leave us.” Early childhood, as our kids gain skills and eagerly want some distance from us, is a time to build a kind of adult-child balance which permits both of us room.”
—Joan Sheingold Ditzion (20th century)
“As life runs on, the road grows strange
With faces new,—and near the end
The milestones into headstones change,
‘Neath every one a friend.”
—James Russell Lowell (1819–1891)