y and conscience impels them to remain attached to the service of your
Majesty with unalterable devotion."

But, as we have seen, nothing could restrain the triumvirate which held
the power just then, and thanks to the suggestions of Pere Lachaise and
Madame de Maintenon, Louis XIV determined to gain heaven by means of
wheel and stake.

As we see, for the Protestants, thanks to these numerous decrees,
persecution began at the cradle and followed them to the grave.

As a boy, a Huguenot could--enter no public school; as a youth, no career
was open to him; he could become neither mercer nor concierge, neither
apothecary nor physician, neither lawyer nor consul. As a man, he had no
sacred house, of prayer; no registrar would inscribe his marriage or the
birth of his children; hourly his liberty and his conscience were
ignored. If he ventured to worship God by the singing of psalms, he had
to be silent as the Host was carried past outside. When a Catholic
festival occurred, he was forced not only to swallow his rage but to let
his house be hung with decorations in sign of joy; if he had inherited a
fortune from his fathers, having neither social standing nor civil
rights, it slipped gradually out of his hands, and went to support the
schools and hospitals of his foes. Having reached the end of his life,
his deathbed was made miserable; for dying in the faith of his fathers,
he could not be laid to rest beside them, and like a pariah he would be
carried to his grave at night, no more than ten of those near and dear to
him being allowed to follow his coffin.

Lastly, if at any age whatever he should attempt to quit the cruel soil
on which he had no right to be born, to live, or to die, he would be
declared a rebel, his goads would be confiscated, and the lightest
penalty that he had to expect, if he ever fell into the hands of his
enemies, was to row for the rest of his life in the galleys of the king,
chained between a murderer and a forger.

Such a state of things was intolerable: the cries of one man are lost in
space, but the groans of a whole population are like a storm; and this
time, as always, the tempest gathered in the mountains, and the rumblings
of the thunder began to be heard.

First there were texts written by invisible hands on city walls, on the
signposts and cross-roads, on the crosses in the cemeteries: these
warnings, like the 'Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin' of Belshazzar, even
pursued the persecuto