behold the affecting
apparition. They fell at our feet, bathed in tears, and speechless,
until, emboldened by our expressions of sympathy, they recounted to us
their sufferings. Alas! all their crime consisted in having been
attached to the same religion as Henry IV. The youngest of these
martyrs was more than fifty years old. She was but _eight_ when first
imprisoned for having accompanied her mother to hear a religious
service, and her punishment had continued until now!"[82]

[Footnote 82: Froissard, "Nismes et ses Environs," ii. 217.]

After the liberation of the last of the galley-slaves there were no
further apprehensions nor punishments of Protestants. The priests had
lost their power; and the secular authority no longer obeyed their
behests. The nation had ceased to believe in them; in some places they
were laughed at; in others they were detested. They owed this partly
to their cruelty and intolerance, partly to their luxury and
self-indulgence amidst the poverty of the people, and partly to the
sarcasms of the philosophers, who had become more powerful in France
than themselves. "It is not enough," said Voltaire, "that we prove
intolerance to be horrible; we must also prove to the French that it
is ridiculous."

In looking back at the sufferings of the Huguenots remaining in France
since the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes; at the purity,
self-denial, honesty, and industry of their lives; at the devotion
with which they adhered to religious duty and the worship of God; we
cannot fail to regard them--labourers and peasants though they
were--as amongst the truest, greatest, and worthiest heroes of their
age. When society in France was falling to pieces; when its men and
women were ceasing to believe in themselves and in each other; when
the religion of the State had become a mass of abuse, consistent only
in its cruelty; when the debauchery of its kings[83] had descended
through the aristocracy to the people, until the whole mass was
becoming thoroughly corrupt; these poor Huguenots seem to have been
the only constant and true men, the only men holding to a great idea,
for which they were willing to die--for they were always ready for
martyrdom by the rack, the gibbet, or the galleys, rather than forsake
the worship of God freely and according to conscience.

[Footnote 83: Such was the dissoluteness of the manners of
the court, that no less than 500,000,000 francs of the public