It was in one of these attacks upon the meetings that Jean Fabre, a Protestant of Nismes, supplicated a commander of a detachment to put him in prison in the stead of his father, an old man of seventy-eight. The governor of the province sent the pious son off to the convict prison of Toulon, considering, it would seem, that the Huguenots did not belong to the human race; and it was only when the drama of the Honest Convict informed the court, the ministers, France, and Europe, of this act of treason against humanity, and when Jean Fabre had worn the chains of the galley-slave for seven weary years, that he was restored to his family.
All the other surprises of meetings offer a repetition of the same enormities, and we will cite that only which happened in Lower Languedoc on the 8th of August, 1756. Three young men were to be ordained to the ministry of the Gospel at this assembly. The solemnity had collected several pastors, and attracted a vast concourse of people; as many as from ten to twelve thousand had come from the whole surrounding country. They were singing a psalm, when a detachment of fifteen or eighteen soldiers made their appearance, hastening musket in hand to the spot. The multitude, although unarmed, might have crushed this handful of assailants by their very weight; but the pastors always preached patience and submission. The crowd leaped to their feet, and precipitately fled in all directions. The troop fired upon them,—every shot told; and while some fell dead, and others wounded, the rest escaped uttering shrieks of terror and grief; only a few stood their ground, and endeavoured to defend their wives and children with stones. The murderers remained masters of the field, and a long track of blood marked the locality of this prayer-meeting. Do we relate a scene of the age of Louis XV., or one of the time of Innocent III. and Simon de Montfort?
Another pastor perished in this deplorable epoch. Etienne Teissier, whose surname of the desert was Lafage, was arrested near Castres, at the farmhouse of a Protestant named Jacques Novis. On the approach of the troops, he endeavoured to escape over the roof; but a gun-shot broke his arm and wounded him in the chin. All the persons in the house were arrested with him, and among them a woman and two young girls. The prisoners followed the guards singing the psalms of the desert-meetings.
Lafage was taken to the prison of Alais. “The Abbé Ricard, canon of Alais, after showing the prisoner the greatest marks of politeness, thought proper to lead off a controversial discussion; and it was not until the unfortunate minister declared that he had not the strength to discuss, that he was nearly mortally wounded, and that his only desire was to prepare himself for his approaching end, that he was relieved from the importunities of the priest. Several of the faithful, however, were admitted to the consolation of visiting the martyr. Even his father and one of his brothers were allowed to see him; and he implored them, to pray for him, but to submit themselves with holy resignation to the decrees of Providence; he assured them, besides, that he was resolved to suffer everything for the cause of the Gospel.... On his arrival at Montpellier, the trial of the minister was arranged and consummated with barbarous rapidity. The unhappy pastor, already dangerously wounded by the fire of the troops, was fastened to the gibbet, which did not, any more than the preparations for the execution, disturb the serenity of his soul. The soldiers who encompassed the scaffold, could not restrain their tears at the aspect of this last sacrifice of a faith so intrepid. The sentence of death was pronounced by Guignard de Saint Priest, the intendant.”[123]
This administrator condemned also, upon his own authority, Jacques Novis as contumacious, sentenced him to perpetual imprisonment at the galleys, confiscated two-thirds of his property, ordered that his house should be razed to the ground (a house razed in 1754 for having sheltered a pastor!), and released his wife and three children, who were well-nigh reduced to beg their bread. All this was done without the intervention of any judge, by the mere sentence of a commissioner; the form of justice was not less outraged than justice itself.
And this act, which would now rouse the indignation of all France,[124] was not an isolated or exceptional iniquity. The other provinces, although treated with more caution than Languedoc, because they did not contain so many religionists, were not without their share of sufferings and victims.
In Saintonge, the Protestants assembled in barns or remote buildings, because the inclemency of the climate would not easily permit them to celebrate their worship in the open air. Whereupon, one day, the intendant ordered the demolition of these places of service to the very last, and sentenced to detention for life at the galleys a poor man, who had allowed meetings to be held in his house. A woman was condemned to perpetual confinement on the bare suspicion of having given asylum to the pastor Gibert; and this very pastor, happily contumacious, was condemned, on the sentence of the intendant, to be hanged, after humbly kneeling before the principal door of a (Roman) Catholic church. His nephew, compelled to be present at the execution, was then sent to the galleys, with a number of Protestants, who had been convicted of having accompanied the minister in his excursions. This took place in 1756.
In the county of Montauban, the soldiers committed brutalities, which did not always pass without an effusion of blood, and the Parliament of Toulouse conceived the idea of enjoining all persons who had been married in the desert, to separate immediately, under pain of fine and corporal punishment. This wrought the dissolution of thousands of families at a single blow, or constrained them to purchase the benediction of the priest by sacrilegious acts of (Roman) Catholicism. The Protestants refused to submit, but they had to suffer every kind of trouble and anguish in their homes. The decree of the Parliament made hundreds of people miserable, but none of them (Roman) Catholics.
The province of Béarn, once so oppressed, the first of the provinces where Louis XIII. had forcibly reinstalled the (Roman) Catholic religion, and where Louvois organized the expeditions of the dragonnades, encountered fresh calamities in 1757 and 1758. The governor put his troops at the disposal of the clergy. The Protestants of Orthez, Salies, and Bellocq fled to the mountains, and more than one hundred persons were proclaimed for capture dead or alive. The curates were generally extremely exacting in the proofs they required from the religionists. Those of Orthez, besides the gifts of large amount, which it was necessary to guarantee in the presence of the notary, made those who had been espoused wait one year, and sometimes two years, before they would give the nuptial benediction. In one case the curate imposed a delay of twelve years.
In Guienne, the Reformed of Sainte Foy, Bergerac, Tonneins, Clairac, and other places, were forced to maintain dragoons, to pay fines, to suffer vexations of every kind; nor were the ideas of re-baptism and re-benediction yet abandoned there in 1758.