The Chevalier's daughter

by Lucy Ellen Guernsey

"Not so, my Marie," answered my mother. "Denise has long been in paradise, if indeed she did perish as reported, and is happily in better employments than avenging herself on these poor creatures. Yet it may well be that the bad air of the vaults so long used as prisons may have poisoned those living over them."

After the fever came a fire, which broke out mysteriously and consumed all the fuel and provisions which the nuns had laid up for winter; and, to crown all, a sort of reservoir or pond, supposed by some to be artificial, which supplied a stream running through the convent grounds, burst its barriers one night after a heavy storm of rain. The muddy torrent, bearing everything before it—trees, walls, and even the very rocks in its course—swept through the garden and washed away the soil itself, besides filling the church with mud and debris half way up to the roof. Whether the hand of man had anything to do with these disasters I do not know, but it is not impossible.

At any rate, the two or three nuns who were left returned to Avranches, from whence they had come, and the place was again abandoned to the owls and other doleful creatures which haunt deserted buildings.

Meantime all over France the tide of persecution was rising and spreading, carrying ruin and devastation far and wide. There was no more any safety for those of the Religion. From all sides came the story of terror, of bereavement, of oppression, of flight. Every day brought new infringements of the edict, new encroachments on our rights and liberties.

The very sick and dying—nay, they more than any others—were objects of attack. Every physician was ordered, on pain of a heavy fine at the least, to give notice to the mayor and the priest of the parish whenever he was called upon to visit one of the Religion. Then the sick man was besieged with arguments, with threats, and horrible representations of the present and the future. If he yielded, which was seldom the case, his conversion was trumpeted as a triumph of the faith. If he persevered, as ninety-nine out of a hundred did, he was left to perish without help or medicine, and his dead body was cast out like a dog's in the next ditch.

It was at the peril of life that a mother repeated to her dying child, or a child to its parent, a few comforting texts of Scripture or a hymn. The alms collected among the Reformed for the solace of their own poor were seized upon and used for the maintenance of the so-called hospitals, which were simply prisons where young people and women were shut up, and every effort made, both by threats and cajolery, to induce them "to return to the bosom of their tender and gentle mother the Church," that was the favorite phrase. A few gave way and were set at liberty, but of these, the most part sooner or later recanted their recantations, with bitter tears of penitence and shame.

But those mothers and fathers who knew that their dead were dead, and entered into the rest of their Lord, were happy in comparison with others, whose sons were in the galleys chained to the oar with the vilest of the vile, with felons and murderers, sleeping on their benches if at sea, driven by the lash like brute cattle to pestiferous dungeons if on land, and liable at any time to be condemned to perpetual imprisonment or shot down and cast to the waves. And even these had not the worst of it.

There were hundreds of mothers who were entirely in the dark as to the fate of their daughters. The convents all over the land were filled with such girls, seduced from their homes on any or no pretext, and dragged away, never to be seen again. Whether they recanted and were made nuns, whether they remained firm and suffered imprisonment and a horrible death, their fate was equally unknown to their friends. In some of the convents, no doubt, were conscientious women, who did their duty according to their lights, and were as kind to their prisoners as circumstances permitted; but there were others who sought to augment their treasure of good works and win heaven, as they say, by exercising every severity, and trampling upon any natural feelings of compassion which might arise in their breasts.

Worse still, many convents were known to be schools of worldliness and vice, where the most dissolute manners prevailed. This was notably the case with the rich houses near Paris, where the superiors were often appointed by the king's mistress for the time being, and the convent was a resort for the young gentlemen of the court.

But it was upon the pastors that the vials of wrath were most lavishly poured out. Some, whose flocks were already scattered, escaped to foreign lands, but many remained behind to comfort their afflicted brethren. These were never for one moment in security. They journeyed from place to place in all sorts of disguises. They slept in dens and caves of the earth, or under the open sky; holding a midnight meeting here, comforting a dying person or a bereaved parent there; now celebrating the Lord's Supper, in some lonely grange or barn, to those of the faithful who had risked everything to break together the bread of life once more; now baptizing a babe, perhaps by the bedside of its dying mother, or uniting some loving and faithful pair of lovers who wished to meet the evils of life together. *