My meals are brought from
outside; if you saw me in my beautiful convict-dress, you would be
charmed. The iron I wear on my leg, though it weighs only three pounds,
inconvenienced me at first far more than that which you saw me in at La
Tournelle." Files of Protestant galley-convicts were halted in the
towns, in the hope of inspiring the obstinate with a salutary terror.

The error which had been fallen into, however, was perceived at court.
The stand made by Protestants astounded the superintendents as well as
Louvois himself. Everywhere men said, as they said at Dieppe, "We will
not change our religion for anybody; the king has power over our persons
and our property, but he has no power over our consciences." There was
fleeing in all directions. The governors grew weary of watching the
coasts and the frontiers. "The way to make only a few go," said Louvois,
"is to leave them liberty to do so without letting them know it." Any
way was good enough to escape from such oppression. "Two days ago,"
wrote M. de Tesse, who commanded at Grenoble, "a woman, to get safe away,
hit upon an invention which deserves to be known. She made a bargain
with a Savoyard, an ironmonger, and had herself packed up in a load of
iron rods, the ends of which showed. It was carried to the custom-house,
and the tradesman paid on the weight of the iron, which was weighed
together with the woman, who was not unpacked until she was six leagues
from the frontier." "For a long time," says M. Floquet, "there was talk
in Normandy of the Count of Marance, who, in the middle of a severe
winter, flying with thirty-nine others on board a fishing-smack,
encountered a tempest, and remained a long time at sea without
provisions, dying of hunger, he, the countess, and all the passengers,
amongst whom were pregnant women, mothers with infants at the breast,
without resources of any sort, reduced for lack of everything to a little
melted snow, with which they moistened the parched lips of the dying
babes." It were impossible to estimate precisely the number of
emigrations; it was probably between three and four hundred thousand.
"To speak only of our own province," writes M. Floquet in his _Histoire
du Parlement de Normandie,_ "about one hundred and eighty-four thousand
religionists went away; more than twenty-six thousand habitations were
deserted; in Rouen there were counted no more than sixty thousand men
instead of the eighty thousand that were to