The Covenant Part 15

'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 Pre 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 n.o.bleman 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 Pre 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 ma.s.sacre 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 Pre'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 Pre married again, and took as his a.s.sistant in the refurbished vineyards the man he had helped rescue at Rheims. And in due course the Abbe 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, a.s.suring the Huguenots that they would henceforth enjoy liberty of conscience and even the right to hold public wors.h.i.+p in certain specified locations outside towns. And as far as Paris was concerned, no closer than twenty miles.

The De Pre 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 Roch.e.l.le against the Catholic armies that were besieging it. He fought gallantly, and died amidst a circle of enemy swords, but with him died his t.i.tle; no longer did Caix have a marquis.

In later years members of the De Pre 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 G.o.d's great account book as either saved or d.a.m.ned. 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 G.o.d's judgment; and if G.o.d saw him misbehaving, He might reverse His decision and place the offender among the d.a.m.ned. 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 Pre family celebrated the birth of a son named Paul. With the extinction of Marquis de Caix's t.i.tle, distant female relatives had sold off the vineyards and the De Pres 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 Pre 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, brus.h.i.+ng 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: 'Threetwo boys and a girl.'

'And if G.o.d should give you less?'

'I would accept the will of G.o.d,' 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 Pre gave birth to her first son, then her second. All that was now required was the daughter, and Paul was certain that since G.o.d 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 a.s.sisted by the mistresses who exercised the real power over the kings of FranceHenry IV would have fifty-six named and recordedthe 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 Pre, 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, pus.h.i.+ng 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 coa.r.s.ely, they retaliated by inviting dragoons from other homes into the De Pre rooms, shouting through the night for more food and drink, and handling Marie roughly when she brought it.

But even so, the senior De Pres 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 embarra.s.sed, 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 Pre. 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.'

It happened in several homes. Children were tricked into saying things of which they could have had no understanding, and away they went, to another town, in another districtand they would never be heard of again. 'You warn your sons to be careful,' the minister said, and then came the anguished nights when mother and father secretly instructed their sons what to say.

'Do your parents lecture you at night?' one of the soldiers would ask the boys.

'No,' he must say.

'Did they ever take away pictures of the saints that you loved?'

'No.'

'Wouldn't you like to attend Ma.s.s with other boys and girls?'

'We go to our own church.'

Now nights became sacred, for when the family was alone in their part of the house, and the soldiers rioting in theirs, Paul took out his Geneva Bible and patiently read from the Book of Psalms those five or six special songs of joy and dedication which the Huguenots had taken to their hearts: 'As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O G.o.d. My soul thirsteth for G.o.d, for the living G.o.d: when shall I come and appear before G.o.d?'

And the elder De Pres drilled their sons in how to avoid the peril which menaced them: 'Our lives would end if you were taken from us. Be careful, be careful what you say.'

In 1685 the axe which had been hanging over the Huguenots fell. King Louis XIV, judging himself to be impregnable, decided to rid himself of Protestants forever. With grandiloquent flourishes he revoked all concessions made to them by the Edict of Nantes and announced that henceforth France was a Catholic country with no place for Huguenots. Dragoons were dispatched to Languedoc, that ancient hiding place for heresy, and whole towns were depopulated. The ma.s.sacre of St. Bartholomew's Day might have been reenacted across France, except that Louis did not want to inherit the moral stain of his forefathers.

Instead, a series of harsh decrees altered French life: 'All Protestant books, especially Bibles in the vernacular, to be burned. No artisan to work anywhere in France without a certificate proving him to be a good Catholic. Every Huguenot clergyman to quit France within fifteen days and forever, on pain of death if he return. All marriages conducted in the Protestant faith declared null and all children therefrom designated b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. Protestant washerwomen not to work at the banks of the river, lest they sully the waters.'

And there was another regulation which the De Pres simply could not accept: 'All children of Protestant families must convert immediately to the true faith, and any father who attempts to spirit his children out of France shall spend the rest of his life on the oar-benches of our galleys.'

What did these extraordinary laws mean in a village like Caix, where the population was mainly Huguenot? Since it had long been an orderly place, it did not panic. The pastor summoned the elders, and when the deacons a.s.sembled, a large percentage of the adult males were present. 'First,' said the minister, 'we must ascertain if the rumor be true. Probably a lie, because four kings have a.s.sured us our freedom.'

But in due course official papers arrived, proving that the new laws were in effect, and a few families converted on the spot, parents and children noisily embracing the traditional faith. Other families met in conclave, and fathers swore that they would die with their infants rather than surrender them to Catholicism. 'We'll walk to the ends of the earth till we find refuge,' Paul de Pre cried flamboyantly, and when the pastor reminded him that the new edicts forbade taking either one's self or one's children out of France, De Pre astounded the a.s.sembly by shouting, 'Then the new laws can burn in h.e.l.l.'

From that moment, others drew away from him. The pastor announced that he would go into exile at Geneva, and the Plons proclaimed loudly that they had never really approved of John Calvin. Paul observed such behavior without comment; they could abandon their religion and their duties at Caix, but not he. And then came the a.s.saults that shattered his confidence.

One morning the soldiers billeted at his farm brought in a mob to ransack the place, searching for Huguenot books. With loud, triumphant voices the soldiers shouted, 'Calvin's Inst.i.tutes! Inst.i.tutes! The Geneva Bible!' And he watched in sick dismay as these testaments were pitched into a bonfire, and as the flames consumed the books, with men roaring approval, one of the soldiers grabbed him by the arm and growled, 'Tomorrow, when the officials come from Amiens, we take your children too.' The Geneva Bible!' And he watched in sick dismay as these testaments were pitched into a bonfire, and as the flames consumed the books, with men roaring approval, one of the soldiers grabbed him by the arm and growled, 'Tomorrow, when the officials come from Amiens, we take your children too.'

That night Paul gathered the family in a room with no candles and told his sons, 'We must leave before morning. You can take nothing with you. Our vineyards will go to others. The house we abandon.'

'Even the horses?' Henri asked.

'We'll take two of them, but the others . . .'

Marie explained to the children in her own words: 'Tomorrow the soldiers will take you away. Unless we go. We could never give you up to others. You are the blood of our hearts.'

'Where are we going?' Henri asked.

'We don't know,' she said honestly, looking at her husband. 'We're heading north,' he said, 'and we've got to cross dangerous lands owned by Spain.'

'Won't they arrest us?' Marie asked. 'Yes, if we're careless.'

He had no clearer concept of where he was going than his infants; all he knew was he must flee oppression. Having once experienced the calm rationalism of John Calvin, he could not surrender that vision of an orderly world. He told his sons, 'I'm satisfied that G.o.d will lead us to the haven for which we are predestined,' and from that conviction he never deviated.

After midnight, when fowls were asleep and roosters had not yet crowed, he led his family north, abandoning all he had acc.u.mulated. How did he have the courage to take a wife and two small children into uncharted forests toward lands he did not know?

Calvinism placed strong emphasis on the fact that G.o.d often entered into covenants with his chosen people; the Old and New Testaments were replete with examples, and Paul could have cited numerous verses which fortified his belief that G.o.d had personally selected him for such a covenant. Lacking a Bible, he had to rely on memory, and his mind fixed upon a pa.s.sage from Jeremiah which Huguenots often cited as proof of their predestination: They shall ask the way to Zion . . . saying, Come and let us join ourselves to the Lord in a perpetual covenant that shall not be forgotten.

Each sunset, when the travelers rose from their daytime sleep to risk the next stage northward, Paul a.s.sured his sons, 'The Lord is leading us to Zion, according to his covenant with us.'

When De Pre arrived in Amsterdam in the fall of 1685 he had with him only his wife, his two sons and a ragtag collection of bundles; the two horses had been sold at Antwerp, where Paul received for them a great deal more than the guilders involved. A crypto-Protestant had given him the address of a fellow religionist who had emigrated some years before to Holland, and it was to this man that the De Pre family reported.

His name was Vermaas and he held two jobs, each of which proved crucial to De Pre: during the week he worked in a dark, drafty weigh-house where s.h.i.+pments of timber, grain and herring from the Baltic were weighed and forwarded to specialized warehouses; on Sunday he served as custodian of the little church near the ca.n.a.ls where only French was spoken. Here Protestants from the Spanish Netherlands and Huguenots from France gathered to wors.h.i.+p G.o.d in the Calvinist manner, and few churches in Christendom could have had a more devout members.h.i.+p than this. Each person who came to pray on Sunday was an authentic religious hero who had sacrificed position, security and wealth^and often the lives of family membersto persevere in Calvinism. Some, like the De Pres, had crept at night across two enemy countries or three in order to sing on Sundays the Psalm that Huguenots had taken specially to their hearts: 'I called upon the Lord in distress: the Lord answered me, and set me in a large place.'

Amsterdam with its burgeoning riches and crowding fleets was indeed a large place, s.p.a.cious in wealth and freedom, and Vermaas epitomized the spirit of the town, for he was a big man, burly in the shoulders and with a wide s.p.a.ce between his eyes.

Intuitively he liked Paul de Pre, and when he learned how this resolute family had fled French tyranny, he embraced them. 'There's a good chance I can find you work at the weigh-house,' he a.s.sured Paul, and to Marie he said, 'I know a little house near the waterfront. Not much, but it's a foothold.'

Vermaas was master weigh-porter, and Paul sensed immediately the importance of this position. Never before had he seen such scales: huge timbered affairs with pans that weighed as much as a man, but so delicately balanced that they could weigh a handful of grain. To these scales, each taller than two men, came the riches of the Baltic. Stout little s.h.i.+ps, manned by Dutch sailors, penetrated to all parts of that inland sea, selling and buying at a rate that would have dazzled a French businessman. At times the weigh-house would be occupied with timber from Norway; at other times copper, iron and steel from Sweden would predominate; but always there were tubs of North Sea herring waiting to be cured by a process known only by the Dutch, after which it would be transs.h.i.+pped to all the ports of Europe.

'Gold with fins,' the men at the weigh-house called their herring, and De Pre learned to tell when a s.h.i.+p with herring was about to unload; this was important, for when the workmen hauled in the tubs of gold, they were permitted to sequester a few choice fish for their families.

De Pre had deposited his wife and children in the miserable shack near the banks of the IJ River, trusting that he would in time be able to find them better quarters. It was a vain hope, for Amsterdam was crowded with refugees from all parts of Europe: Baruch Spinoza, the brilliant Portuguese Jew, had lived here while unraveling the mysteries of G.o.d; he had died only a few years ago. Rene Descartes had elected to come here to conduct his work in mathematics and philosophy, and a score of great theologians from all countries had considered Amsterdam the only safe place to conduct their speculations. The English Pilgrims had rested nearby before sailing on to Ma.s.sachusetts, and it was still the major center for the rescue of Jews from a score of different lands.

Houses were not easy to find, but with the aid of timber Paul acquired at the waterfront and cloths with which to stuff the windy cracks, he and Marie converted their shack into a livable home, and although the dampness caused much coughing, the family survived. The boysHenri, six, and Louis, fivereveled in the ca.n.a.ls that cut across the city and the endlessly changing river up which the Baltic s.h.i.+ps came.

'The Golden Swamp' Amsterdam had been called in the old days, for it was then four-fifths water, but engineers were ingenious in filling in the shallow lakes to build more land. Son Henri's first comment on his new home was apt, and the De Pres often quoted it: 'I could get in a boat, if I had a boat, and row and row and never come back.' And every year men dug new ca.n.a.ls, so that the city became a network in which every house was connected by water with every other, or so it seemed.

The French church, seated on one of the most interesting small ca.n.a.ls, had started in 1409 as a Catholic cloister, but during the Reformation it was converted into a refuge for generations of fleeing dissidents. Rebuilt many times, it became a monument not only to Protestantism but also to the essential generosity of the Dutch, for its ministers, a courageous lot of French-speaking Walloons, who had dared much in coming here, had always been given pensions by the Dutch government on the grounds that 'we are seekers after truth and are richer in having you among us.' No other nation in recorded history gave immediate pensions to its immigrants, or profited more from their arrival.

With pride Paul led his family to this church on Sundays, pointing out to the boys the various other Frenchmen who worked along the waterfront. It was an impoverished congregation, with many families subsisting only through the generosity of Dutch patrons, but invariably someone in the group provided flowers for the altar, and it was because De Pre commented on this that his good fortune commenced.

One Monday morning, as Paul and Vermaas were hefting bales of cloth onto their weigh-scales, the big man said, 'You like flowers, don't you, Paul?'

'Where does the church always find flowers?'

'The Widows Bosbeecq send them over. They're looking for someone to tend their garden.'

'Who are the widows?'

'Aloo! This one doesn't know the Widows Bosbeecq!' And the workmen came to joke with him.

'What s.h.i.+p have you been unloading?' When De Pre pointed, the men cried, 'That's their s.h.i.+p. And that one and that one.'

It seemed that seven of the best s.h.i.+ps sailing the Baltic belonged to the widows, and Vermaas explained, 'Two country girls married the Bosbeecq brothers. The men were fine captains who worked the Baltic for many years. In time they had seven s.h.i.+ps, like that one.'

'How did they die?'

'Fighting the English, how else?'

In 1667 the older Bosbeecq brother had accompanied the Dutch fighting fleet right into the river Thames, threatening to capture London itself; he had gone down with his s.h.i.+p the next year. The younger brother helped in three notable victories over the English, but he, too, had died at the hands of the English, and the family's profitable trade with Russia might have evaporated had not the two widows stepped forward to operate the fleet. Choosing with rural skill those captains who would best preserve their profits, they continued to send their doughty potbellied vessels to all parts of the Baltic.

Sometimes the widows would appear at the docks, always together and with parasols imported from Paris, and would primly inspect whichever of their s.h.i.+ps happened to be in the harbor, nodding sagely to their captains and approving of the manner in which their cargoes were being handled. They were in their sixties, somewhat frail, dressed in black. They walked carefully, attended by a maid who shoved idlers aside for them. One was tall and very thin; the other was roundish, always with a broad smile. Never once did they complain about anything, but Vermaas a.s.sured De Pre that when they had their captains alone in the family office, they could be quite tart.

A few days after their conversation Vermaas ran up to De Pre with exciting news: 'It happened by accident. When the Bosbeecq factor was here the other day I told him you liked flowers. He became quite interested, because the Widows Bosbeecq are still looking for a gardener.' So it was arranged that Paul quit work early one afternoon and accompany the Bosbeecq factor to the tall, thin house on the Oudezijdsvoorburgwal (Old-sides-forward-city-d.y.k.e) where the widows waited.

'We have a large garden,' they explained, and from a narrow window Paul could see a garden so neatly trimmed that he could scarcely believe it was real. 'We like it neat.' There was also much work to be done inside the house, and the widows wondered if Paul had a wife. 'Is she able?' they asked. 'Is she enc.u.mbered with children?'

'We have only two boys.' Quickly he added, 'They're quite grown, of course.'

'How old?'

'Six and five.'

'Oh, dear. Oh, dear.' The sisters-in-law looked at each other in real dismay.

Paul sensed that his entire future depended upon what he did next, and he started to say, 'Those boys have walked all the way from . . .' Dramatically he stopped, for he knew that this was irrelevant. Instead he said quietly, 'Please! We live in a cold, damp shack, and my wife keeps it like a palace. She could do wonders here.'

The Widows Bosbeecq liked their servants to be at work at five in the morning; it discouraged sloth. But once on the job, the workers enjoyed surprising freedoms, the princ.i.p.al one being that they were exceptionally well fed. The widows liked to prepare the food themselves, leaving to Marie de Pre the cleaning of rooms, the sweeping of the stoep and the ironing of clothes sent upstairs by the slaves. They were good cooks, and being country women, felt that one of man's major requirements was an adequate supply of food, and where growing boys were concerned, downright gorging was advisable.

'It must have been G.o.d who brought us here,' Paul said frequently, and on Sundays he led his brood across the ca.n.a.l to the French church for prayers. One Sunday the widows intercepted him as he was about to leave: 'You should attend our church now. It's just as close.'

The idea stunned De Pre. It seemed almost blasphemous that he should abandon the church of his fathers, the place in which French was spoken, and attend a different one which used Dutch. He had never considered this before, since he was convinced that G.o.d spoke to mankind in French and he knew that John Calvin did. It would have surprised him to know that Calvin's princ.i.p.al works had been written in Latin, for the solemn thunder of Calvin's thought had reached him in French translation, and he could not imagine it in Dutch.

He discussed this with his family, even though the boys were scarcely old enough to comprehend the difference between French, the correct language of theology, and Dutch, an accidental: 'Within the family we must always speak French. It's proper for us to speak with the widows in Dutch, and you boys must always thank them in that language when they give you clothes or toys. But in our prayers, and in the services at the church, we must speak French.'

He told the widows, 'I went to see your church and it must be the finest in Christendom, because ours is certainly a small affair. But we have always wors.h.i.+pped G.o.d in our own language . . .'

'Of course!' the widows said. 'We were thoughtless.'

The fact that De Pre now lived in the Bosbeecq house, with no further obligations at the weigh-station, did not mean that he lost touch with Vermaas. On Sundays, after church, they would often meet to discuss affairs pertaining to the Bosbeecq s.h.i.+ps, and one fine April day they stood together at the bridge leading from the French church as the two widows came down the cobblestones, attended by their servant.

'Pity you're married,' Vermaas said.