a town of France, department of Ardèche, near the river of that name, 14 miles S.W. of Privas. It is beautifully situated on the slope of a hill, but its streets generally are crooked, narrow, and filthy. It is surrounded by a ruinous wall flanked with towers, and has an old castle. Manufactures, silk and woollen. Pop. 4262.

AUBIGNÉ, Théodore-Agrippa D', the bold, able, but somewhat irascible historian of the French Huguenots, was born at St. Maury, in the province of Saintonge, in 1550. From his father, who fell fighting in the cause of religious liberty, he inherited an ardent attachment to the Protestant cause; and while still a youth, escaping from his guardians, he took part in the third religious war of that period. He had the good fortune to survive the massacre of St. Bartholomew's day, and fled to the court of the king of Navarre, afterwards Henry IV.; but though his services, both in the council and the field, were esteemed by Henry, D'Aubigné more than once retired in disgust from court, where his temper had created many enemies. Yet the king appears always to have had a high opinion of his integrity; and, contrary to the advice of his friends, intrusted him with the custody of the king's formidable rival, Cardinal Bourbon, when a prisoner. He was faithful to his trust in his castle of Maillezais, to the government of which he was promoted by Henry, and whither he retired on the conversion of the king in 1593. There he wrote several able controversial dissertations, and composed his principal work, L'Histoire Universelle, which the Catholic party used every means to suppress, and the parliament of Paris ordered to be burnt by the executioner in 1620. The government made many attempts to induce him to resign his stronghold; and finding it no longer tenable, he in that year resigned it into the hands of the Duc de Rohan, the leader of the Huguenots, and retired to Geneva, where he died in 1620, at the age of 80.