The female captives that fateful evening would as usual be transported in tumbrils to the dreaded Tour de Constance at Aigues-Mortes, the royal prison overlooking the sea. Despite the overcrowding in the ghastly tower there was always room for new captives in its dark chambers of suffering: there the conditions and treatment of religious offenders were worse than for others, sufficient to cause them to waste away in despair. Only their prayers and psalms seemed to keep them alive. The whip also helped.

But prior to their conveyance south and in line with the Versailles dictate, the women had to be scourged. Thirty strokes apiece over the bare back, down to the hips.

Joanne and Martine were among the prisoners taken by the marauding dragoons that night. Being among the youngest, they were dealt with first. Stripped to the hips. Martine was dragged to the munition case the troops had unloaded from the baggage mules, bent over, a rough cord encircling the thighs and wrists, her breasts crushed brutally, to receive the lash. The dragoon corporal seemed to derive special pleasure from flogging females: the bulge in his breeches betrayed it. He looked forward to blooding the half-naked women and especially Martine with her well-fleshed body and swarthy skin. Sweeping her long, dark tresses forward to clear the shoulders, he whipped the eighteen-year-old ferociously; the youngster's shrieks echoed through the surrounding woods terrifying those waiting in line, guarded by the muskets and flashing sabres. When her turn came after Martine had been flayed and thrown aside, Joanne was hauled to the flogging block, her woollen smock being ripped from her shoulders. She positioned herself without waiting to be manhandled, descending her skirt well below her hips to the birth of her rear cleft to provide the man with a maximum of skin to mark. The flogger smiled at the gesture. Much would he have enjoyed opening up a naked arse but orders unfortunately confined him to the back and there, as orders prescribed, only down to the birth of the buttock crease.

Practically unattached, Joanne hoped to take the lashes stoically without struggling, stifling her cries; she even turned her drooping head to watch the fellow grease the ox hide - to enhance the pain. Then she gritted her teeth. Although now twenty-two and just married to the austere Jean-Jacques, the weaver, she had throughout her adolescence received the whip regularly from her parents at home for the least breach of discipline and, on those occasions, she was invariably stripped. Those whippings during her maidenhood had given her welts but also a strange pleasure that had her masturbating furiously when sent to bed. The orgasms steered her through waves of lascivious lust into a delirious aftermath as, with one hand, she fingered the imagined ridges of scarlet bruises over her rump and thighs and, with the other, punished her clitoris to bring herself off.

Preparing herself for the whip before countless eyes in the torchlit clearing, she felt her vagina starting to throb, her heartbeat quickening. Her sidelong glance caught sight of the lump in the dragoon's crotch. It was obvious the lout was taking his duties to heart and she was aware she was presenting him with one of the prettiest bodies in the Cevennes - the attendant priest, Father Delpuech admitted as much as he watched - and she found herself almost challenging the young dragoon to commence.

The scourge's fanged extremities bit in deep across the back, striking the swollen teats the flogger had been careful to draw out from under the crush of the thorax. The flagellation seemed endless as Joanne writhed not only in pain but with resentment that her buttocks were not bared for welting. Finally the last lash did curl round the waist close to the sloping rise of the rump but it merely sliced into the thin skirt drawn tight and wet over the trembling cheeks. When she rose unsteadily from her knees, she sensed blood had been drawn from somewhere round the ribs but far more manifest, at least to her, was the warm sex sap oozing from the bloated labia. The clitoris had during the first lashes shuffled off its protective sheath and Joanne knew it was rearing fully erect, begging for attention.