Palissy was one of those Protestants, was known as one, and he was not slaughtered. From this fact has come a good part of his glory, as a few words may serve to explain.
For a long time the struggle for power between the Catholic party and the Huguenot party had raged, with varying fortunes, when both sides pillaged and persecuted, and true religion was driven to the wall, or fled from France. At last the Catholic party, under the lead of the Duke of Guise, secured the preëminence, and in due time—in 1559—severe edicts were issued against the Protestants. Palissy was not safe; but by that time he had acquired reputation as a potter, and had made pieces of his rustic ware for the king and for members of the court. He was known to the king; and the queen-mother, Catherine de’ Medicis, brought him to Paris, established his furnaces in the grounds of the Tuileries, made him a servant of the king, and so saved him for the time from the persecutions which swept away his brethren.
It must be remembered that those were days in which many men believed—believed that their truth or faith was the only thing to save them from the eternal fires of hell. Palissy was one of those earnest, intense, narrow natures who believed their faith was the only true faith for man. All the influence of the queen, the persuasions of the priests, and even the appeals of the king, could not shake him. Palissy has written his own story, and it has the interest of romance and the fervor of faith. When he was eighty years old he was thrown into the Bastile, with other stanch Huguenots, because of his faith. The king, Henry III., is reported to have said:
“My good friend, you have now been five-and-forty years in the service of my mother and myself; we have allowed you to retain your religion in the midst of fire and slaughter. Now I am so hard pressed by the Guises and my own people, that I am constrained to deliver you up into the hands of your enemies, and to-morrow you will be burned unless you are converted.”
Inflexible to the last, the old man is reported to have answered the king in this wise:
“Sire, I am ready to resign my life for the glory of God. You have told me several times that you pity me; and I in my turn pity you, who have used the words ‘I am constrained.’ It was not spoken like a king, sire; and these are words which neither you nor those who constrain you, the Guisards and all your people, will ever be able to make me utter, for I know how to die.”
The whole world admires pluck; and that, we cannot doubt, marked the character of the man. We need only to look at his face ([Fig. 72]) to believe that he might have said those words. And those who came after him, inheriting in a degree the hatred of the Catholics which he enjoyed, have not allowed the words nor the fame of the man to die.
But he was not put to death; he lingered out his last year in the prisons of the Bastile, and then departed.
The story he left behind him, of his own struggles and sufferings in seeking and finding the arts of the potter, has been intensified by his admirers; they have added to its intrinsic interest by telling of his patience, his endurance, his suffering, and his final success—that which can be imparted by the glow of admiring souls, who see in him a hero such as they would themselves wish to be, but are not.