The covenant - James A. Michener [111]
Among the foot soldiers who routed the Catholics was the wine-maker, Giles de Pre, who, when he returned home weary and triumphant, announced to his wife that he was now a Huguenot. When she asked what this word meant, he could not explain, nor could he tell her what his new religion stood for, nor had he heard of the Institutes, or Geneva. But he knew with striking clarity what his decision entailed: 'It's an end of priests. No more bishops shouting at us what to do. That big monastery, we'll close it down. People will behave themselves, and there will be order.'
Slowly the village of Caix became a Huguenot center, but with almost none of the changes predicted by De Pre in effect. The good Abbe Desmoulins continued as before, arguing forcefully with the marquis against the theory of predestination. When the bishop arrived from Amiens he thundered in the same old way, except that now he fulminated against Calvin and the Huguenots. In 1564 John Calvin, the most significant Frenchman of his era, died in Geneva, but his influence continued to spread.
In 1572 the Marquis de Caix, veteran of nine battles in which Huguenots confronted royal armies, decided to visit Geneva to see for himself what changes Calvinism sponsored when it actually commanded a society, and with his chief farmer Giles de Pre, set out on horseback for the distant city. Any Huguenot had to be careful these days in traveling about France, for that old tigress Catherine de Medici waged ceaseless war against them, even though she had long since ceased being the legal queen; and if a Protestant like the Marquis de Caix, with his powerful military reputation, dared to move about, he was apt to be pursued by a real army and slain on the spot. So the two travelers moved cautiously, like two rambling farmers, eastward toward Strasbourg, then south to Besancon and across the low mountains into Geneva.
The visit was a disaster. The free-and-easy marquis found that Calvin's successors were terrified lest their Protestant Rome, as some called it, be overturned by Catholic princes storming up from the south. Extreme caution ruled the city, with synods condemning men to be burned for theological transgressions. When the marquis, wearied by his long journey, sought some inn where he could employ the services of a maid to ease his bones and comfort him, the innkeeper turned deathly pale: 'Please, monsieur, do not even whisper . . .'
'You must have some girls?'
The innkeeper placed his two hands upon the wrist of his guest and said, 'Sir, if you speak like that again, the magistrates . . .' He indicated that at some spot not far from therewhere, he never knewthere would be spies: 'Catholics trying to destroy our city. Protestants ready to trap men like you.'
'I seek some merriment,' the marquis said.
'In Geneva there is no merriment. Now eat, and say your prayers, and go to bed. The way we do.'
Wherever they moved, the two Frenchmen encountered this sense of heavy censorship, and it was understandable. The city, inspired by fear of a Catholic attack on the one hand and Calvin's severe Protestantism on the other, had evolved what later historians would describe as 'that moral reign of terror.'
'This is not what I had in mind,' the marquis confided to his farmer. 'I think we had better quit this place while we have four legs between us. These maniacs would chop a man in half. . . and all because he smiled at a pretty girl.'
They slipped away from Geneva without ever having announced themselves to the authorities, and during the long ride back home they often halted at the edge of some upland farm, sitting