The Covenant: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  ‘What happens here?’ the marquis called as one of the rioters rushed past with a flaming brand.

  ‘We’re killing all Protestants!’ the man cried as he ran to a house whose inhabitants he did not like.

  ‘Careful, careful!’ the marquis whispered as he led his horse gingerly into the center of the rioting. ‘Why are you hanging him?’ he shouted to members of a mob about to throw a rope over the lower branches of a tree.

  ‘Huguenot.’

  ‘On whose orders?’

  ‘Messengers from Paris. We’re killing them everywhere. Cleansing the country.’

  ‘Sir,’ De Pré whispered. ‘I think we should ride on.’

  ‘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 Pré 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 nobleman 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 Pré 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 massacre 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 Pré’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 Pré married again, and took as his assistant in the refurbished vineyards the man he had helped rescue at Rheims. And in due course the Abbé 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, assuring the Huguenots that they would henceforth enjoy liberty of conscience and even the right to hold public worship in certain specified locations outside towns. And as far as Paris was concerned, no closer than twenty miles.

  The De Pré 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 Rochelle against the Catholic armies that were besieging it. He fought gallantly, and died amidst a circle of enemy swords, but with him died his title; no longer did Caix have a marquis.

  In later years members of the De Pré 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 God’s great account book as either saved or damned. 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 God’s judgment; and if God saw him misbehaving, He might reverse His decision and place the offender among the damned. 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 Pré family celebrated the birth of a son named Paul. With the extinction of Marquis de Caix’s title, distant female relatives had sold off the vineyards and the De Prés 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 Pré 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, brushing 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: ‘Three—two boys and a girl.’

  ‘And if God should give you less?’

  ‘I would accept the will of God,’ 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 Pré gave birth to her first son, then her second. All that was now required was the daughter, and Paul was certain that
since God 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 assisted by the mistresses who exercised the real power over the kings of France—Henry IV would have fifty-six named and recorded—the 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 Pré, 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, pushing 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 coarsely, they retaliated by inviting dragoons from other homes into the De Pré rooms, shouting through the night for more food and drink, and handling Marie roughly when she brought it.

  But even so, the senior De Prés 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 embarrassed, 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 Pré. 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 district—and 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 Mass 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 God. My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God: when shall I come and appear before God?’

  And the elder De Prés 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 massacre 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 bastards. Protestant washerwomen not to work at the banks of the river, lest they sully the waters.’

  And there was another regulation which the De Prés 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 assembled, 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 assured 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 Pré 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 Pré astounded the assembly by shouting, ‘Then the new laws can burn in hell.’

  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 assaults 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 Institutes! 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 God 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 accumulated. 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 God 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 God had personally selected him for such a covenant. Lacking a Bible, he had to rely on memory, and his mind fixed upon a passage 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 assured his sons, ‘The Lord is leading us to Zion, according to his covenant with us.’

  When De Pré 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 Pré family reported.