The Covenant (34 page)

The visit was a disaster. The free-and-easy marquis found that Calvin’s successors were terrified lest their Protestant Rome, as some called it, be overturned by Catholic princes storming up from the south. Extreme caution ruled the city, with synods condemning men to be burned for theological transgressions. When the marquis, wearied by his long journey, sought some inn where he could employ the services of a maid to ease his bones and comfort him, the innkeeper turned deathly pale: “Please, monsieur, do not even whisper …”

“You must have some girls?”

The innkeeper placed his two hands upon the wrist of his guest and said, “Sir, if you speak like that again, the magistrates …” He indicated that at some spot not far from there—where, he never knew—there would be spies: “Catholics trying to destroy our city. Protestants ready to trap men like you.”

“I seek some merriment,” the marquis said.

“In Geneva there is no merriment. Now eat, and say your prayers, and go to bed. The way we do.”

Wherever they moved, the two Frenchmen encountered this sense of heavy censorship, and it was understandable. The city, inspired by fear of a Catholic attack on the one hand and Calvin’s severe Protestantism
on the other, had evolved what later historians would describe as “that moral reign of terror.”

“This is not what I had in mind,” the marquis confided to his farmer. “I think we had better quit this place while we have four legs between us. These maniacs would chop a man in half … and all because he smiled at a pretty girl.”

They slipped away from Geneva without ever having announced themselves to the authorities, and during the long ride back home they often halted at the edge of some upland farm, sitting beneath chestnut trees as they discussed what they had seen. “The trouble must rest with Geneva,” the marquis said. “We’re not like that in France, spies and burnings.”

“The good far outweighs the bad,” De Pré argued. “Perhaps they have to do this until the others are disposed of.”

“I caught the feeling they were doing it because they liked to do it.”

The travelers reached no conclusion, but the marquis’s suspicions deepened, and he might have changed his mind about Protestantism as the solution to the world’s evils had he not become aware that along the roads of France there was a considerable movement of messengers scurrying here and there, and he began to wonder if perchance they were looking for him. “What are they after?” he asked De Pré, but the farmer could not even make a sensible guess.

Since it was mid-August, there was no necessity to frequent towns or cities in search of accommodation, so the men slept in fields, keeping away from traveled routes, and in this way moved across northern France toward the outskirts of Rheims. On the morning of August 25 they deemed it safe to enter a small village north of that city, and as they did so, they found the populace in a state of turmoil. Houses were aflame and no one was endeavoring to save them. Two corpses dangled from posts, their bowels cut loose. A mob chased a woman, caught up with her, and trampled her to death. Other fires were breaking out and general chaos dominated the village.

“What happens here?” the marquis called as one of the rioters rushed past with a flaming brand.

“We’re killing all Protestants!” the man cried as he ran to a house whose inhabitants he did not like.

“Careful, careful!” the marquis whispered as he led his horse gingerly into the center of the rioting. “Why are you hanging him?” he
shouted to members of a mob about to throw a rope over the lower branches of a tree.

“Huguenot.”

“On whose orders?”

“Messengers from Paris. We’re killing them everywhere. Cleansing the country.”

“Sir,” De Pré whispered. “I think we should ride on.”

“I think not,” the marquis said, and with a sudden spur to his horse he swept down upon the rioters, knocked them aside, and grabbed the doomed man by his shoulders, striving vainly to swing him to safety. The man’s feet were lashed so that he could not help himself, and he would have been stamped to death by the mob had not De Pré dashed in, grabbed him by the thighs, and galloped off beside the marquis.

When they were well out into the country they halted, and the nobleman asked the bound man what had taken place. “Midnight, without warning, they leaped upon us. I hid in my barn.”

“Huguenot?”

“The same. My wife hanged. They had a list of every Protestant and tried to kill us all.”

“What will you do?”

“What can I do?”

“You can come with us. We’re Huguenots too.”

The frightened man rode with De Pré until they reached an isolated farm, where the marquis asked, “Is this a good Catholic farm?”

“It is indeed,” the owner said.

“Good. We’ll take that horse. We’re Huguenots.”

It would be remembered in history as St. Bartholomew’s Day, that awful August massacre which the Italian queen mother, Catherine de Medici, instigated to destroy Protestantism once and for all. In cities and towns across France, the followers of Calvin were knifed and stabbed and hanged and burned. Tens of thousands were slain, and when the joyous news reached Rome, Pope Gregory XIII exulted, and a cardinal gave the exhausted messenger who had brought the news across the Alps a reward of one thousand thalers. A medal was struck, showing the Pope on one side, an avenging angel on the other castigating heretics with her sword. In Spain, King Philip II, who
would soon be losing his Armada to Protestant sailors from England and Holland, dispatched felicitations to Catherine on her meritorious action: “This is one of the greatest joys of my entire life.” Lesser people celebrated in lesser ways.

Even in a village as remote as Caix the slaughter raged, and if the marquis and his farmer had been at home that fateful night, they would have been slain. As it was, the marquis’ barns were burned, his vineyards ravaged; and Giles de Pré’s wife was hacked into four pieces. It was a fearful devastation, one of the worst in French history, and its hideous memory would remain engraved on the soul of every Huguenot who survived.

Some did. The Marquis de Caix resumed his residence in the village, always ready to sally forth on whatever new battle engaged his fellow Protestants. Giles de Pré married again, and took as his assistant in the refurbished vineyards the man he had helped rescue at Rheims. And in due course the Abbé Desmoulins found that he was more attuned to the sober precepts of John Calvin than to the rantings of his bishop at Amiens; like hundreds of priests in Huguenot areas, he changed his religion, becoming a stout defender of his new faith.

In this quiet way the village of Caix became again solidly Huguenot, and in 1598 held joyful celebrations when that fine and sensible king, Henry IV, issued the Edict of Nantes, assuring the Huguenots that they would henceforth enjoy liberty of conscience and even the right to hold public worship in certain specified locations outside towns. And as far as Paris was concerned, no closer than twenty miles.

The De Pré family continued as wine-makers, servants to the successive Marquis de Caix, until that fatal year of 1627 when the last marquis rode off to help defend the Huguenot city of La Rochelle against the Catholic armies that were besieging it. He fought gallantly, and died amidst a circle of enemy swords, but with him died his title; no longer did Caix have a marquis.

In later years members of the De Pré family stayed with their vineyards and the church started by Calvin, but never did these rural people descend to the harshness practiced at Geneva or to the burnings conducted there. French Calvinism was a quiet, stable, often beautiful religion in which a human being, from the moment he was conceived, was registered in God’s great account book as either saved or damned. He would never know which, but if life smiled on him
and his fields prospered, there had to be a supposition that he was among the saved. Therefore, it behooved a man to work diligently, for this indicated that he was eligible to be chosen.

This curious theology had a salutary effect in Caix: any person who presumed that he was among the elect had to behave himself for two reasons. If he was saved, it would be shameful for him to behave poorly, for this would reflect upon God’s judgment; and if God saw him misbehaving, He might reverse His decision and place the offender among the damned. Prayer on Wednesday, church at ten on Sunday, prayer at seven Sunday evening was the weekly routine, broken only when some fanatical Catholic priest from a nearby city would storm into Caix and rant about the freedoms the heretical Huguenots were enjoying. Then there might be insurgency, with soldiers rioting and offering to slay all Protestants, but this would be quickly suppressed by the government, with the inflammatory priest being scuttled off to some less volatile area.

In 1660, when even these sporadic eruptions had become a distant memory and when all France glowed from the glories attendant upon King Louis XIV, the De Pré family celebrated the birth of a son named Paul. With the extinction of Marquis de Caix’s title, distant female relatives had sold off the vineyards and the De Prés had acquired some of the choicest fields. At ten, young Paul knew how to graft plants in the field and supervise their grapes when they were brought in for pressing. The De Pré fields produced a crisp white wine, not of top quality but good enough to command local respect, and Paul learned each step that would ensure its reputation.

He was a sober lad who at fifteen seemed already a man. He wore a scarf about his neck the way old men did and was fastidiously careful of his clothes, brushing them several times a day and oftener on Wednesdays and Sundays. At sixteen, he astonished his parents by becoming in effect a deacon; he wasn’t one, technically, but he helped regulate life in the community and served as visitor to families needing financial help.

“I should like to be an elder one day,” he told his parents that year, and he was so serious that they dared not laugh.

They were not surprised when, at the age of eighteen, he announced that he had decided to marry Marie Plon, daughter of a neighboring farmer, and he rejected their suggestion that they accompany him when he went to seek permission of the elders for the marriage. Gravely he stood before the leading men of the community
and said, “Marie and I have decided that we must get on with our lives. We’re going to work the old Montelle farm.”

When the elders interrogated him, they found that he had everything planned: when the wedding was to be, how the Montelle farm was to be paid for, and even how many children they proposed to have: “Three—two boys and a girl.”

“And if God should give you less?”

“I would accept the will of God,” Paul said, and some of the elders laughed. But they approved the marriage, and one man made Paul extremely happy when he said at the conclusion of the interrogation, “One day you’ll be sitting with us, Paul.” It was with difficulty that he refrained from retorting, “I intend to.”

The marriage took place in 1678, launching the kind of strong, rural family that made France one of the most stable nations in Europe, and promptly, in accordance with the master plan, Marie de Pré gave birth to her first son, then her second. All that was now required was the daughter, and Paul was certain that since God obviously approved of him, a daughter would appear in due time.

But now, once again, there were ominous signs in French society. Devout Catholics were shuddering at the blasphemous liberties allowed Protestants under the Edict of Nantes and pressed for its repudiation. Always assisted by the mistresses who exercised the real power over the kings of France—Henry IV would have fifty-six named and recorded—the clerical faction succeeded in annulling one after another the liberties enjoyed by the Calvinists.

The minister at Caix explained to his congregation the restrictions under which they all now lived: “You cannot be a teacher, or a doctor, or a town official, even though Caix is mostly of our faith. You have got to show the police that you attend one meeting a month to listen to government attacks on our church. When your parents die, Protestant burial services can be held only at sunset, lest they infuriate the Catholics. If you are heard speaking even one word in public against Rome, you go to jail for a year. And if either you as a citizen or I as a minister try to convert any person to our faith, we can be hanged.”

None of these new laws touched Paul de Pré, and he lived a contented life regardless of the pressures being applied to his community. But in 1683 two events occurred which terrified him. One morning two of the king’s soldiers banged on the door and told Marie that they had been billeted to her home, whereupon, pushing
her aside, they stamped into the farmhouse, selected a room they liked, and informed her that this would be their quarters.

Marie ran to the vineyard, calling for her husband, and when he reached the house he asked quietly, “What happens here?”

“Dragooned,” the soldiers said.

“What does that mean?”

“We live here from now on. To keep an eye on your seditions.”

“But—”

“Room. We’ll use this one. Bed. You can move the blue one in. Food. Three good meals a day with meat. Drink? We want those bottles kept filled.”

It was a dreadful imposition, which worsened when the lonely soldiers tried to drag local girls into their quarters. Forbidden by the Catholic priest from a neighboring village to behave so coarsely, they retaliated by inviting dragoons from other homes into the De Pré rooms, shouting through the night for more food and drink, and handling Marie roughly when she brought it.

But even so, the senior De Prés did not appreciate where the real danger lay until one Sunday morning when they found the soldiers behind the barn talking earnestly with the two boys. When Paul came upon them, the soldiers seemed embarrassed, and that afternoon he sought out the Calvinist minister for guidance.

“I might have killed them, for it seemed ominous,” he confessed.

“Indeed it was,” the clergyman said. “You’re in great peril, De Pré. The soldiers are interrogating your boys to trick them into saying something against our religion or in favor of theirs. One word, and the soldiers will take your boys away forever, claiming that they said they wanted to be Catholics but that you prevented their conversion.”