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146 THE HUGUENOTS, 1600-1762
Royal," says Blaise Pascal (and his own sister was one of the first victims of the persecution), ts astonished to hear it said that they were in the way of perdition, that their confessors were leading them to Geneva by teaching them that Jesus Christ was neither in the Eucharist nor at the right hand of God, and knowing that the charge was false, committed them- selves to God, saying with the Psalmist, (Look well if there be any way of wickedness in me' " (Ps. cxxxix., verse 24). Mere Angelique died August 6th, 1661, with the same words of the Psalms upon her lips which Xavier had used at the end of his toilsome career, " In Thee, 0 Lord, have I put my trust; let me never be put to confusion " (Ps. xxxi., verse i). Her brother Antoine, an exile, or in hiding for fear of the Bastille, had learned the Psalms by heart lest his eyesight should grow too dim to read them daily. It is a psalm that strikes the keynote of the Pensees of Pascal, the glory and the champion of the Port Royal community. His "Thoughts,'* in which the Psalms are repeatedly quoted, are jotted down, with a failing hand, on loose fragments of paper, in his brief respites from the agony of mortal sickness. They show us his passionate heart in the midst of strife and perplexity. They reveal, with the unsparing severity of scientific detachment, the depths of mystery that surround the narrow ledge on which men stand. Yet, through all the gloom and shadow, there ever burns the sacred flame of personal conviction, that in God, and in God alone, is light. Reason had, he thought, attained its highest point when it realised that an infinite number of things lie beyond its reach. Men ought to know when to doubt, when to be certain, when to submit. "Feel no surprise," he says, (< that plain, unlettered men believe the Christian faith without exercising their reason. They are inspired by God with a love of holiness and a hatred of themselves. God inclines their hearts to faith. If God does not so incline the heart, no man will believe with a true, effectual faith. But if the heart be so inclined by God, none can refuse belief. Of this truth David was well aware when he wrote, (Incline my heart unto Thy testimonies' " (Ps. cxix., verse 36).
Like the Port-Royalists, Madame Guyon suffered persecution from the leaders of the Catholic reaction. In her prison at Vincennes, she wrote those spiritual songs, many of which were translated into English verse by William Cowper. Yet into whatever mazes of speculation she was tempted, her own words, expressed in the language of the Psalms, reveal the starting-point of her spiritual fancies, disclose the object of her quietism, and justify the defence of Fenelon. She learnt, by frequent yieldings to temptation, her entire dependence on the Divine aid. tt I became," she says, ft deeply assured of what the prophet hath said, * Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain * (Ps. cxxvii., verse 2). When I
REVOCATION OF EDICT OF NANTES 147
looked to Thee, 0 my Lord, Thou wast my faithful keeper;
Thou didst continually defend my heart against all kinds of enemies. But, alas! when left to myself, I was all weakness. How easily did my enemies prevail over me! "
When slight deviations from strict orthodoxy were punished with exile or imprisonment, it was not likely that open revolt would be spared. The treaty of Alais was torn up; the Edict of Nantes revoked (1685). Under Louis XIII. and Louis XIV. successive edicts were directed against the Huguenots, and especially against their use of the Psalter. The singing of psalms was prohibited in streets or shops, forbidden in private houses, restricted even in Protestant temples. As the seven- teenth century closed, legislation grew more severe under the austere piety of Madame de Maintenon and the religious zeal of Pere la Chaise. Penal laws banished Protestant pastors. Death was the penalty for those who returned, or for any who sheltered them: possession of the heretic's property rewarded those who betrayed them. Protestant meetings were pro- scribed ; possessors of a Protestant Bible or Psalter were liable to imprisonment and confiscation. The dragonnades inflicted untold horrors. A brutal soldiery, quartered in the houses of the Huguenots, was encouraged to pillage, torture, and outrage. Nor were the victims suffered to escape. Guards were doubled on the frontiers, and the peasants were armed to assist in arresting fugitives. But the Huguenot buried his books under a tree, hoped for better times, and continued his psalmody in cave or forest, careless that the sound might betray him to his persecutors or consign him to the galleys.
Even among the Alps, liberty of singing psalms was denied. The Protestants of the Vaud were driven from their homes, and dispossessed of their property. The exiles, diminished in number by the hardships of a winter journey across the Alps, with voices choked by exhaustion and misery, sang Psalm Ixxiv. (<( 0 God, wherefore art Thou absent from us so long ? why is Thy wrath so hot against the sheep of Thy pasture ? ") as they streamed into Geneva, and the words were re-echoed by the crowds who thronged the streets of the City of Refuge. Three years later (1689), it was the same psalm which was chanted in triumph by seven hundred of the exiles, who, led by their pastor, Henri Arnaud, had fought their way back to their homes. " The gallant patriots took an oath of fidelity to each other, and celebrated Divine service in one of their own churches for the first time since their banishment. The enthusiasm of the moment was inexpressible: they chanted the 74th Psalm to the clash of arms, and Henri Arnaud, mounting the pulpit with a sword in one hand and a Bible in the other, preached from the i2Qth Psalm, and once more declared in the face of heaven, that he would never resume his pastoral office in patience and peace, until he should
148 THE HUGUENOTS, 1600-1762
witness the restoration of his brethren to their ancient and rightful settlements/'
On the 22nd of October 1685, Michel Ie Tellier, as Chan- cellor of France, set the seal, almost with his dying hand, to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The towns and vil- lages and houses of the Protestants were pillaged and set on fire; their fields and vineyards were laid waste; they were burned alive, broken on the wheel, hung from the gibbet, or cut to pieces by the dragoons. Their midnight assemblies were again and again surprised, and the most venerated of their pastors were executed. The victims who died by sudden death were to be envied. More terrible still was the fate of the men who were chained to the oar at the galleys under the lash of barbarous officers, or of the women who were doomed to perpetual imprisonment in the loathsome dens of mediaeval cruelty, such as the Tour Constance in the Castle of Aigues Mortes, where the prisoners, herded together in dark and stifling dungeons, were left a prey to the melancholy thoughts that harmonised with the monotonous cadence of the waves, or the wind moaning over the marshes.
Among the rocky savage fastnesses of the Cevennes, the simple religion of the Protestant mountaineers assumed a stern and gloomy cast. Fervour easily passed into fanaticism, and ecstasies of faith readily lent themselves to self-deception. The enfants de Dieu, possessed by hysterical hallucinations, claimed for their wild words a prophetic inspiration. Goaded to desperation by their sufferings, seeing at every cross-road the corpses of friends swinging in the air, the peasants were carried away by the fiery appeals of prophets and prophetesses, who urged them to arm against the enemies of God, and fight to the death for the true Church. Upon their excited minds the Psalms exercised an almost supernatural power. "As soon," says Durand Fage, " as we began to sing the chant of the Divine Canticles, we felt within us a consuming fire, an ecstatic desire which no words can express. However great our fatigue, we thought of it no more. The moment the chant of the Psalms struck our ears, we grew light as air."
With such temperaments, it needed but a spark to kindle the smouldering fury of the people into a flame which should spread through the mountains with the devastating rapidity of lightning. That spark was lighted by Francois du Chayla, Prior of Laval, and Inspector of Protestant Missions in the district of Gevaudan.
This man was the chief agent in the persecution of the Protestants of the Cevennes. His house at Pont de Montvert, close to the bridge over the Tarn, was at once a prison and a torture-chamber, in which neither sex nor age was spared, and where children and young girls received no mercy. In 1702 the Abb6 du Chayla held a& prisoners a number of
THE ABB^ DU CHAYLA 149
Protestants who had been captured in an attempted escape to Geneva. On the evening of July 23rd, 1702, a party of resolute men, numbering fifty in all, goaded by the appeals of their prophets, determined to rescue the prisoners. As night fell, they met under three gigantic beeches on the slope of the mountain of Boughs, called in the patois of the country ts Alte fage." Some were armed with swords, some with scythes, some with halberds of ancient make: only a few carried guns or pistols. Before they set out on their enterprise, they prayed together, and then, chanting the Psalms of Marot as they went, marched on Pont de Montvert. They reached the village about nine in the evening, and still singing the Psalms, sur- rounded the house of the abb6.
The abb6 was dining in company with his fellow-labourers, when the rude chant of the Psalms reached his ears. Suppos- ing that the Protestants had ventured to hold a conventicle within ear-shot of his house, he ordered his guard to seize the rash worshippers. But the house was surrounded so that none could pass out. On all sides the cry was heard, " Bring out the prisoners." The abb6, a determined man, showed that he would yield only to force. At his command the soldiers fired upon his assailants, and one of the prophets was killed and others of the party wounded. The infuriated Protestants, seizing the trunk of a tree, beat down the door, swarmed into the house, and rushed to the dungeons. A second discharge proved fatal to another of the rescuing party. Exasperated by the sight of their tortured brethren, and provoked by resistance, the C6venols piled together the furniture of the house, raked up the straw on which the soldiers slept, threw on the heap the seats from the Chapel, and set the building on fire. Then the abb6 and his friends endeavoured to escape from the windows at the back of the house. Tying the sheets of their bedding together, they attempted to reach the garden. The abb6 fell and broke his thigh, but, crawling into the bushes, hid himself. Others, more fortunate, came to the ground safely, and, plunging into the Tarn, escaped.
As the fire gathered fierceness and caught hold of the timber of the house, the glare of the flames revealed the lurking- place of the abb6. His cry for mercy was mocked. Dragged into the open, he was killed. Each successive assailant as he delivered his blow, cried out that it was in vengeance. f< Take that/' cried one, "for my fathers sake, whom you broke on the wheel." "Take that," cried another, ^for my brother, whom you sent to the galleys." "And that," shouted a third, "for my mother, whom you killed with grief." Fifty-two wounds were found on his body, of which twenty-five were mortal. Only two persons discovered in the house were spared, All the livelong night, amid the crash of falling timbers, and the roar and hiss of flames, which drowned the murmur of the
i5o THE HUGUENOTS, 1600-1762
Tarn, the deliverers chanted their Psalms in wild ecstasy of vengeance, and, as the day dawned, it was with a psalm of triumph that they withdrew with their rescued brethren to their mountain fastnesses.
With this ferocious act of vengeance began the war of the Cevennes, in which, with the Psalms for their battle-cry, a handful of peasants defied the armies of Louis XIV., defeated his most skilful marshals, and negotiated on equal terms with the Grand Monarque himself.
On Sunday, December 24th, 1702, Jean Cavalier had assembled eighty of his followers for worship on Christmas Eve. The service had barely begun, when his sentinels, posted on .the hills, gave the alarm. The commandant of Alais, with six hundred foot-soldiers and fifty mounted gentry, was upon them. It was with a psalm that the Camisards attacked their assailants, routed them, and pursued the fugi- tives up to the gates of Alais.
Four months later, April 1703, Cavalier and his band bivouacked in a deserted farm-house called Bellot, near Alais. Built on the ruins of a feudal castle, the house was surmounted by a tower, and surrounded by a wall and deep ditch. At midnight a traitor led the soldiers to the spot. Four thousand royalists surprised four hundred sleeping Camisards. Cavalier escaped along the moat, and, after a vain attempt to rescue those who were hemmed in within the enclosure, drew off a portion of his men under the cover of darkness. From midnight till eight the next morning the defenders of Bellot held their own. Their ammunition was spent; but, refusing to yield, they perished to a man in the blazing ruins, still raising with their latest breath the words of their beloved psalms.
The Psalms were again the battle-cry of the Huguenots at Les Devois de Martignargues, where, in March 1704, Cavalier won a brilliant victory. The royalist general. La Jonquiere, with a considerable number of foot-soldiers, dragoons, and grenadiers, had pursued the Camisards from Moussac to Brignon, and thence higher up the mountains to the bleak uninhabited spot which was the final scene of the conflict. There Cavalier determined to make his stand. After praying with his men, he took up a strong position, posting an ambus- cade to his left and right. La Jonquiere led his men to the attack. The Camisards lay down till the royalists had dis- charged their pieces. Then, springing to their feet, and thundering out the Psalms, they charged the enemy, while at the same moment the men in ambush attacked on both flanks. The royalists broke and fled, the victorious Camisards in hot and merciless pursuit.
It was with the Psalms that Roland, another of the Cami- sard leaders, routed the royalists at the bridge of Salindres, in the spring of 1709. In pursuit of Cavalier, the Marquis de
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Lalande, we of the greatest coxcombs of the day, but an experienced soldier, had reached Anduze. There two peasants were introduced into his presence to tell him that Roland was about to seize the Bridge of Salindres, over the river Gardon. The men were in truth emissaries of the Camisard chief. Lalande fell into the trap. Acting on their information, he determined to seize the Bridge. To reach it, he had to pene- trate a narrow, winding pass. On one side rose bare precipitous cliffs; on the other ran a deep ravine, at the bottom of which seethed the mountain torrent of the Gardon. At the entrance of the gorge, Roland had concealed a body of his troops; on the rocks above, he had stationed another band; he himself, with a third company, held the Bridge of Salindres. Lalande, suspecting nothing, entered the ravine. When he had en- tangled himself in its narrow windings, a signal was given, and he found himself attacked in front and rear, while enor- mous rocks, hurled from the cliffs above, swept his men by files at a time into the river. Above the rattle of the musketry, the crash of the falling rocks, and the confused cries of the soldiers, was heard the triumphant psalm of the Camisards. The whole army seemed doomed to perish. One path alone had not been occupied by the mountaineers; it descended the side of the ravine, and crossed the Gardon by a mill-dam. Down this path of safety rushed Lalande with a few of his followers, so hotly pursued that he left his plumed hat behind him, and escaped with his wig in flames. As evening fell, the din of battle ceased. In the quiet valley, whose silence was only broken by the roar of the Gardon, rose the 48th Psalm:
(( Dieu aux palais (Pelle est cognu Et pour sa defense tenu," etc.
As the unequal war dragged on,�as, time after time, at unequal odds, the king's troops were defeated,�as the moun- taineers held their own against trained soldiers and experienced generals, they grew strong in the conviction that God was on their side. (< Our enemy," says Mazel, one of the Camisard historians," were as the sand on the seashore in number, and we were but a little company. They had horses, and chariots, and gold, and weapons, and castles. We had no such aid, but the Lord God of Hosts was our strength."
The same serene confidence which had nerved the arms of the Camisards, inspired the quiet heroism of the Protestant lt Pastors of the Desert," who, in the first half of the eighteenth century, braved danger and death to carry on their proscribed ministrations. In the long list of executions, there are but tew victims who were not sustained in their last hours by the words of the Psalms.
In 1745, Louis Rang, the brother of a minister who only saved himself from the scaffold by flight, a young man of
152 . THE HUGUENOTS, 1600-1762
twenty-live years of age, and himself a minister of the Pro- testant religion, was arrested at Livron. He was thrown into prison at Valence, and condemned to die at Grenoble, March and, 1745. In vain the President of the Court had offered him his life if he would abjure his faith. He rejected all offers. His sentence was that he should be hung in the market place at Die, and that his head should be severed from his body and exposed on a gibbet opposite the little inn at Livron, where he had been arrested. On his way to the scaffold, he sang verse 24 of Psalm cxviii.:
" La voici Pheureuse journee Qui repond a notre desir;
Louons Dieu, qui nous Pa domiee;
Faisons en tout notre plaisir."
His voice was drowned by the roll of drums. With his eyes raised to heaven, he reached the foot of the scaffold, fell on his knees in prayer, then mounted the ladder and met his death.
A few weeks later, Jacques Roger, a venerable man of seventy years of age, forty of which he had spent as a Pro- testant pastor, was betrayed to the government and arrested. Ordained at Wiirtemburg, and therefore one of the few regularly ordained ministers, he had braved the law which made it a capital offence to return to France. For forty years he had escaped, often by a hair*s breadth, the pursuit of the soldiers, who had tracked him like a wild beast. The officer in command asked him who he was, " I am he," he replied, " whom you have sought for thirty-nine years; it was time that you should find me." Condemned to death at Grenoble, he spent his last hours in encouraging some Protestant prisoners to be true to their faith. When the executioner and his assistants arrived to take him to the place of execution, he received the summons cheerfully, quoting the same verse which Louis Rang had sung on the scaffold (Ps. cxviii., verse 24). From prison he went to his death chanting Psalm li. i
The same Psalm (li.) was sung, on his way to execution, by Francois Benezet, a young man who was studying for Holy Orders. He was executed in January 1752, on the esplanade at Montpellier. His youth, his courage, and the fact that he left a widow and child, created a profound impression among his co-religionists. His fate is commemorated in one of the rude songs which, through their uncouth stanzas, breathe the fervent piety and indomitable resolution of the Protestants.
The last of the martyred pastors of the desert, was Francois Rochette, who, in 1760, had been consecrated pastor at the provincial synod of Haut Languedoc. In the district of Quercy he spent some laborious months, preaching, administering the
FRANCOIS ROCHETTE 153
Communion, visiting the sick, teaching the young, celebrating marriages, baptisms, and funerals, for the twenty-five Re- formed churches which fell to his charge. His health being injured by his incessant labours, he left Montauban, in Sep- tember 1761, to drink the waters at St Antonin. On his way through Caussade, he was asked to baptize a child. It was midnight, and, not knowing his way, he sent his guides into the town to find a native of the place who would take him to the house where his services were required. As the guides were returning to the pastor, they endeavoured to evade observation by leaving the main road. Some passers-by, catching sight of them, mistook them for robbers who infested the neighbourhood, and sent the town-guard in pursuit of them. They were seized by the patrol, and with them Rochette. Taken before the magistrates, Rochette boldly avowed his calling, and was committed to prison.
The excitable populace of the South were aroused. Believing that a plot was on foot among the Protestants to pillage the town, they rang the tocsin, donned the white cockades of St Bartholomew^ Day, and attacked the heretics. The Pro- testants, on their side, armed themselves, and a bloody conflict seemed imminent. Though the outbreak was prevented, the affair sealed the fate of Rochette and his companions. Petitions were presented to the Due de Richelieu, and to Marie Adelaide, Princess of France, the daughter of Louis XV., who had shown herself inclined to mercy. All was in vain. Rochette was tried at Toulouse in November 1761; in the following February the sentence of death was pronounced. He was offered his life if he would abjure his faith. He refused, and, on February aoth, 1762, the sentence was executed. To the last, Rochette encouraged his companions. Through the crowded streets, thronged with spectators, the car was drawn to the place of execution in the Place du Salin. Rochette mounted the scaffold with a firm step, chanting as he went, ff La voici Fheureuse journee," etc. (Ps. cxviii., verse 24).
It was fitting that the last words of the last Protestant martyr should be taken from that Book of Psalms which, through two centuries of conflict and persecution, had meant so much to the Huguenots. "It was," said Florimond de Remond, <( the Book of Psalms which fostered the austere morals of the Huguenots, and cultivated those masculine virtues that made them the pick of the nation. It was that book which supported fainting courage, uplifted downcast souls, inspired heroic devotion. Their affirmations were certes or en verite; they were enemies of luxury and worldly follies;
they loved the Bible or the singing of spiritual songs and psalms better than dances and hautboys. Their women wore sober colours, and in public appeared as mourning Eves or penitent Magdalens; their men, habitually denying them-
154 THE HUGUENOTS, 1600 1762
selves, seemed struck by the Holy Spirit." Nor was it only their virtues
which the Psalms had fostered. From the same book they justified their ferocity.
To them Rome was Babylon, and the Reformed Church was Sion. Their enemies were
God's enemies. They were His appointed instruments of vengeance, and they made
war in the spirit of Calvin's commentary on Psalm cxxxvii., verses 8, Q, and of
his defence of its imprecations on the women and children of their
foes.