The covenant - James A. Michener [113]
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 Pre married again, and took as his assistant in the refurbished vineyards the man he had helped rescue at Rheims. And in due course the Abbe 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 Pre 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 Pre 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 Pre 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 Pres 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 Pre 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