by Eugène Sue
Finally, informed by my account concerning the double encounter of his brother, Count Neroweg, and Odet his son, with my father and myself, Colonel Plouernel learned later that both had perished in the fight, leaving him the head of the house, and sole heir of its vast domains.
Victorious at Roche-la-Belle, the Protestants were destined to suffer a serious defeat in September of the same year. The royal and Protestant armies met in Poitou, near the town of Montcontour. Coligny, much the inferior in numbers, manoeuvred his forces with his customary skill, and entrenched himself behind the River Dive. Sheltered by that almost impregnable position, he wished to wait for the reinforcements promised by Montgomery, who was in almost complete possession of Gascony. But, as had happened so many times before, to the misfortune of the cause, and despite all his firmness, Coligny saw himself constrained to yield to the headlong impatience of his army, the greater part of which consisted of volunteers. The campaign had lasted a long time. Captains and soldiers had left their families, their property, their farms, their fields and their homes to fly to the defense of their religion. They were anxious to return to their hearths. Accordingly, hoping by means of a victory to be able once more to impose peace upon Charles IX and reconquer the free exercise of their religion, they were loud in their demand for battle. Coligny yielded. On September 3, 1569, he delivered battle to an army almost twice the size of his own. Despite the prodigies of bravery displayed by the Huguenots, and although the royalists sustained heavy losses, victory remained with the Catholics. Nevertheless, after Montcontour, as after Jarnac, so far from allowing himself to be disheartened by a reverse that he had foreseen and that he had vainly sought to avoid, Coligny executed so threatening a retreat that the Catholic army dared not pursue him. On the very night after the defeat, the Protestant chieftains, assembled at Parthenay, despatched couriers to Scotland, Germany and Switzerland appealing to their co-religionists for support; collected the shattered fragments of their armies; threw strong garrisons into Niort, St. Jean-d’Angely, Saintes and La Rochelle; crossed the Charente; marched into Gascony to join Montgomery, who was the master of that province; and Coligny renewed hostilities with success, choosing as the basis of his operations the Rivers Tarn and Garonne. Armed bands of intrepid Protestants harassed and tired out the royal forces. Charles IX and his mother took the Huguenots for annihilated after the defeats of Jarnac and Montcontour. It was otherwise. The defeated men reappeared more determined, more numerous, more zealous in the defense of their rights. Catherine De Medici, more and more convinced that peace, and not war, offered the sole means to put an end to the Huguenots, turned her thoughts more resolutely than ever before to the execution of the infernal project that Francis of Guise conceived at the time of the triumvirate, and which she confided to the Jesuit Lefevre. She caused overtures to be made to Coligny looking to a new treaty of peace. The royal advances were met. The Admiral, together with several other Protestant chiefs, deputed as the plenipotentiaries of the Huguenots, held long conferences with the envoys of Charles IX, and finally, on August 10, 1570, a new edict, the most favorable yet granted to the Protestants, was signed at St. Germain.
The document provided in substance:
The memory of all past events is blotted out by both parties. Freedom of conscience is implicitly granted throughout the kingdom. None is henceforth to be constrained to commit any act forbidden by his conscience in religious matters. No distinction exists between Catholics and Protestants in the matter of admission to the colleges, Universities, hospitals, asylums, or any other institution of learning or of public charity. None shall be prosecuted for past actions. Coligny and all other Protestant chiefs are declared good and loyal subjects. Protestants are qualified to hold all royal, seigniorial or municipal offices. All decrees rendered against the Huguenots shall be stricken from the judicial records. Finally, and in order to guarantee the execution of the said edict, Charles IX places, as pledges for the term of two years, the cities of La Rochelle, Cognac, Montauban, and La Charite, in the hands of the Princes of Navarre, of Condé and of twenty other Protestant Princes, the said towns to be places of refuge for all those who might not yet venture to return to their own homes.
Alas! those who, in the language of the edict, might not yet venture to return to their own homes, despite the peace being signed, promulgated and sworn to, justly suspected some new trap concealed under the lying peace. Antonicq Lebrenn did not take his leave of Admiral Coligny and Monsieur Lanoüe until after the close of the war. They were informed by him of the revelations contained in Anna Bell’s letter to her father Odelin, the letter wherein the maid of honor of Catherine De Medici reported the conversation which she overheard between the infamous Queen and the Jesuit Lefevre, in the course of which the Queen disclosed to the Jesuit her project of lulling the suspicions of the Huguenots with the false appearance of a peace, to the end of taking them by surprise, unarmed and confiding, and exterminating them on one day throughout the kingdom. The project seemed so monstrous to Coligny that he looked upon it as only a chimera of delirious wickedness, and held it for impracticable, if only on the ground of there not being murderers enough to execute the butchery.
The Admiral deceived himself. There never is a lack of murderers in the Catholic party. These rise by the thousand at the voice of the Roman priests. All priests are potential murderers with a patent from their faith.
CHAPTER VII.
“CONTRE-UN.”
TOWARDS THE END of the month of August in the year 1572, the Lebrenn family was gathered one evening in the large hall that served for storeroom to the arms turned out by the establishment of Antonicq Lebrenn, who continued his father’s trade at La Rochelle. The room had the appearance of an arsenal. On the shelves along the walls lay arms of all sorts in profusion — swords, daggers, sabers, cutlasses, pikes, halberds, battle maces and axes; further off, long and short-barreled arquebuses, pistols and some firearms of a novel fashion. These were light and easy to handle, an invention of the celebrated Gaspard of Milan, who gave them the name of “muskets;” finally, there was a large display of casques, morions, cuirasses, corselets, brigandines, armlets, shields and bucklers, some of the latter made of iron, others of wood inlaid with sheets of steel. The workshop, with its furnaces, anvils and other utensils, was situated behind the storeroom, where, on this day the Lebrenn family, six in number, were congregated — Marcienne, Odelin’s widow; Antonicq, her son; Theresa, his sister, married three years before to Louis Rennepont, the nephew of Brother St. Ernest-Martyr; Josephin, the Franc-Taupin; Captain Mirant, Marcienne’s brother; his daughter Cornelia, the betrothed of Antonicq; and finally John Barbot, a boilermaker, the widower of Jacqueline Barbot, who was the god-mother of Anna Bell, and who died two years previously. In the assemblage were also the two artisans of the establishment, Bois-Guillaume and Roland, besides a fifteen-year-old apprentice whom they nicknamed “Serpentin.”
Although it was the hour for rest, these different personages were not idle. Marcienne, Odelin’s widow, spun at her wheel. Clad in black, she had made up her mind to remain in mourning for the rest of her life in memory of the tragic deaths of her husband and her daughter, Anna Bell. The widow’s pronounced features, the cast of her face at once serious, firm and kind, preserved the primitive type of the women of the Santones, a race which, according to what historians tell us, preserved itself pure from times immemorial, almost without admixture with foreign strains since the olden days of Gaul. Theresa, Marcienne’s eldest daughter, was busy sewing, and from time to time cast a glance of maternal solicitude upon her child, who lay asleep in a cradle that off and on she rocked with her foot. Theresa expected with increasing anxiety the return of her husband, Louis Rennepont, who, several weeks before, left for Paris, whither he was deputed by the Rochelois, owing to the vague yet increasing apprehensions entertained by the Protestants, due to the circumstance that Coligny, together with almost all the Protestant leaders, was drawn to Paris on the occasion of the marriage of Henry
of Bearn to the King’s sister Marguerite. Theresa’s headgear was the time-honored and common one of the women of the region — a high, white and pointed coif, adjusted to the coil of her tresses. Her robe, made of grey bolting-cloth, was slashed with a red front-piece, that partly covered her white and starched chemisette. From the belt of her apron hung two long silver chains, at the lower end of which were attached her penknife, scissors, a pin-cushion, some keys, and other utensils inseparable from a good housekeeper. Near Theresa Rennepont and behind her, Cornelia Mirant, her cousin, the betrothed of Antonicq, was ironing some household linen. The face of Cornelia also preserved in all their purity the characteristics of a Santone woman of the heroic days of Gaul. A luxurious head of light chestnut hair with a golden glint, twisted into strands and wound into a thick-topknot on her head; a white and ruddy skin; a small forehead; light eyebrows of a shade less brilliant than her hair and penciled in an almost straight line above her orange-brown, flashing and resolute eyes; a straight nose, prolonged in almost a straight line from the forehead, as seen in the lofty statues of antiquity; a pair of fleshy and cherry-red lips; a pronounced chin; — these features imparted to Cornelia’s face a strikingly lofty stamp. The girl’s tall stature, her flexible neck, her well rounded shoulders, her white and strong arms, the gentle contour of her bosom, recalled the noble proportions of the Greek Pallas Athene. With this virile appearance, Cornelia united the sportiveness, and the sweet and coy charms of a maid. Dressed Rochelois fashion like her cousin, Theresa, she had, in order to be at greater ease, rolled up the sleeves of her robe, and the strong muscles of her arms, which were white as marble, rose and fell with every impression of the hot iron upon the linen that she was smoothing. Ever and anon, however, the iron remained inactive for a moment. At such moments Cornelia raised her head to listen more attentively to the reading with which Antonicq was entertaining the assembled family; and her eyes would then bend upon him, not with any furtive tenderness, but, on the contrary, endeavoring to meet his own gaze with the serene confidence of a betrothed bride. Cornelia’s father, Captain Mirant, one of the most intrepid seamen of La Rochelle, a man still in the full strength of his years, was engaged at sketching some defenses that he deemed requisite to the safety of the port. Near the captain sat his chum, John Barbot, the boilermaker of the isle of Rhe. His wife, Anna Bell’s god-mother, had died of grief. She never could pardon herself for the loss of her god-child; after long years of weeping over what she deemed her own negligence, the poor woman sank into her grave. Not wishing to sit idly by, John Barbot was furbishing a steel corselet with as much care as he would have done one of the magnificent copper basins with artistic relievos, or one of his tinplated iron sheets, which, set up in his boilermaker’s shop, shone with the glitter of gold or silver. A man of exceptional courage, above all of great self-possession in the hour of danger, Barbot had taken part in the late religious wars. Among other scars he wore one inflicted by a saber cut, dealt so furiously that, after cropping the boilermaker’s left ear, it plowed through his cheek and carried away the tip of his nose. Despite the mutilation, John Barbot’s face preserved an expression of unalterable good nature. The Franc-Taupin polished the barrel of an arquebus just taken, tarnished and defaced, from the forge. The old leader of the Avengers of Israel, the man to whom circumstances had imparted an implacable ferocity towards papists, still always carried, hanging from a string fastened to the buttonhole of his coat, the little piece of wood on which, by means of notches, he kept tally of the Catholic priests whom he killed in reprisal for the death of his sister and the torture of Hena. The notches had now reached the number of twenty-four. The implacable avenger was seated on the other side of the cradle of Theresa’s child, and shared the mother’s duties of lightly rocking it. Whenever the child woke up, the Franc-Taupin would drop the barrel of the arquebus on his knees and smile to the baby — at least as hard as the Franc-Taupin could smile. He lived on a small pension granted to him by the municipality of La Rochelle, in reward for the long years of service that he rendered in the capacity of sergeant of the city archers. Josephin transferred to Antonicq, to Antonicq’s sister and to their mother the devoted attachment of which he gave so many signal proofs to Christian Lebrenn and his wife Bridget, to their daughter Hena and their son Odelin. Finally, the two artisans employed in the shop, Bois-Guillaume and Roland, as well as Serpentin the apprentice, occupied themselves with something or other connected with their trade, more for the sake of keeping their hands busy than for actual work, while they listened to Antonicq, who was reading aloud.
Antonicq read the Contre-Un, a work written by Estienne of La Boetie, who died about nine years before. Never yet did reason, human dignity, the sense of justice, the holy love for freedom, the whole-souled horror for tyranny, speak a language more eloquent and more warm from the heart than the language spoken in that immortal book. It was a cry of execration, an anathema against oppression. The avenging cry, leaping from the indignant soul of a great citizen, caused all noble hearts to vibrate responsively. Those pages, every word of which breathes ardent conviction, steeled the faith of all the honorable people, who finally at the end of their patience with the monstrous crimes that royalty, the accomplice or tool of the Church of Rome, was still soiled with in this century, were seriously considering, the same as the Low Countries were doing, the advisability of following the example of the Swiss cantons, which federated themselves in a Republic. The work of Estienne of La Boetie, by calling upon all the oppressed to resistance Against-One who oppresses them, laid bare to them, with terse and pitiless logic, the despicable causes of their Voluntary Servitude, the original title of that admirable work.
Antonicq Lebrenn continued to read the Contre-Un amid the profound silence maintained by the assembled family:
“There are three species of tyrants, I speak of wicked princes: The first have the kingdom by popular election; the second by force of arms; the third by inheritance. Those who acquired it by the right of war deport themselves as on conquered territory; those who are born kings are usually no better; nourished in the blood of tyranny, they take in the tyrant’s nature with their milk, and look upon their people as hereditary serfs. He, to whom the people conferred the State, should (it would seem) be more endurable, and so would he be, I hold, if, seeing himself raised above all others and flattered by the undefinable thing called grandeur, he did not generally bend his energies to preserve the power that the people loaned him, and to transmit the same to his own children.
“Accordingly, to speak truthfully, I do perceive that there is some difference between these different tyrants. But if one is to choose, the difference ceases. The act of reigning remains virtually the same — the elective ones govern as if they had bulls to tame; the conquering ones look upon their people as their prey; hereditary kings see in their subjects natural slaves.
“Speaking intelligently, it is a great misfortune to be subject to a master of whom one can never be certain that he will be good, seeing he ever has it in his power to be bad whenever it should so please him. I do not mean at this point to debate the question, to wit, Whether Republics are better than monarchy? If I wished to consider that question, I should first wish to know, What rank monarchy is to take among Republics, or if monarchy can at all rank with Republics, considering the difficulty of believing that there could be anything public in a government where all belongs to one?
“I wish I could understand how it happens that so many citizens, so many men, so many cities, so many nations often endure only a tyrant, who has no power except that given to him; who has no power to harm them but because of their own power to endure him! What! A million men, miserably held in subjection, their necks under the yoke, not compelled by force, but enchanted and charmed by the word ONE, neither the power of whom they need fear, seeing he stands alone; nor the qualities of whom they should love, seeing that, as to them, he is inhuman and savage! Such is the weakness among us, men!
“Oh, good God! What can that be?
What name shall we call the thing by? What peculiar calamity is it? or what vice? or, rather, what calamitous vice? To see a vast number, not obey, but serve! Not governed, but tyrannized! With neither property, nor parents, nor children, nor yet their own lives that they may call their own! Suffer plunderings, pillagings, cruelties, not at the hands of an army, not at the hands of a camp of barbarians, against which one would shed his blood and risk his life — but endure all that from ONLY ONE! Not from a Hercules, or a Sampson, but from a single mannikin, generally the most cowardly, the most effeminate of the nation, at that! Not accustomed to the powder of battles, but even hardly to the dust of tourneys! Can we give to that the name of cowardice? Are we to say that those who remain in subjection are poltroons? That two, that three, that four should fail to defend themselves against ONE, that would be singular enough, yet possible; in which case we could justly say it is faint-heartedness. But when a hundred, when a thousand endure everything from ONLY ONE, can it then be said that they do not want, that they dare not lay hands upon him, and that it is not a case of cowardice, but rather of disdain and contempt? If so, what monstrous vice is this that deserves not the title of cowardice, that finds no name villainous enough to designate it by, that nature disowns having brought forth, and that the tongue of men refuses to name?”