The central importance of Psalm-singing in early modern French Reformed Protestantism is well-known. Its overall significance as a devotional, penitential and consolatory practice is also understood. Missing is any real insight, or even access, to the inner dynamics of appropriation of the psalms by early modern French Protestants, and specifically by galley slaves, because critical editions of their writings are lacking. This case study of Élie Neau’s interiorisation of the psalms while incarcerated in the Citadelle Saint-Nicolas and the Château d’If in Marseille traces the ways one hundred and twenty citations, reminiscences, semantic echoes or textual borrowings from fifty psalms present in his writings shaped his militant spirituality and resistance to the horrors of the galleys and the dungeons during the last decade of the seventeenth-century.