The covenant - James A. Michener [116]
From that moment, others drew away from him. The pastor announced that he would go into exile at Geneva, and the Plons proclaimed loudly that they had never really approved of John Calvin. Paul observed such behavior without comment; they could abandon their religion and their duties at Caix, but not he. And then came the assaults that shattered his confidence.
One morning the soldiers billeted at his farm brought in a mob to ransack the place, searching for Huguenot books. With loud, triumphant voices the soldiers shouted, 'Calvin's Institutes! The Geneva Bible!' And he watched in sick dismay as these testaments were pitched into a bonfire, and as the flames consumed the books, with men roaring approval, one of the soldiers grabbed him by the arm and growled, 'Tomorrow, when the officials come from Amiens, we take your children too.'
That night Paul gathered the family in a room with no candles and told his sons, 'We must leave before morning. You can take nothing with you. Our vineyards will go to others. The house we abandon.'
'Even the horses?' Henri asked.
'We'll take two of them, but the others . . .'
Marie explained to the children in her own words: 'Tomorrow the soldiers will take you away. Unless we go. We could never give you up to others. You are the blood of our hearts.'
'Where are we going?' Henri asked.
'We don't know,' she said honestly, looking at her husband. 'We're heading north,' he said, 'and we've got to cross dangerous lands owned by Spain.'
'Won't they arrest us?' Marie asked. 'Yes, if we're careless.'
He had no clearer concept of where he was going than his infants; all he knew was he must flee oppression. Having once experienced the calm rationalism of John Calvin, he could not surrender that vision of an orderly world. He told his sons, 'I'm satisfied that God will lead us to the haven for which we are predestined,' and from that conviction he never deviated.
After midnight, when fowls were asleep and roosters had not yet crowed, he led his family north, abandoning all he had accumulated. How did he have the courage to take a wife and two small children into uncharted forests toward lands he did not know?
Calvinism placed strong emphasis on the fact that God often entered into covenants with his chosen people; the Old and New Testaments were replete with examples, and Paul could have cited numerous verses which fortified his belief that God had personally selected him for such a covenant. Lacking a Bible, he had to rely on memory, and his mind fixed upon a passage from Jeremiah which Huguenots often cited as proof of their predestination:
They shall ask the way to Zion . . . saying, Come and let us join ourselves to the Lord in a perpetual covenant that shall not be forgotten.
Each sunset, when the travelers rose from their daytime sleep to risk the next stage northward, Paul assured his sons, 'The Lord is leading us to Zion, according to his covenant with us.'
When De Pre arrived in Amsterdam in the fall of 1685 he had with him only his wife, his two sons and a ragtag collection of bundles; the two horses had been sold at Antwerp, where Paul received for them a great deal more than the guilders involved. A crypto-Protestant had given him the address of a fellow religionist who had emigrated some years before to Holland, and it was to this man that the De Pre family reported.
His name was Vermaas and he held two jobs, each of which proved crucial to De Pre: during the week he worked in a dark, drafty weigh-house where shipments of timber, grain and herring from the Baltic were weighed and forwarded to specialized warehouses; on Sunday he served as custodian of the little church near the canals where only French was spoken. Here Protestants from the Spanish Netherlands and Huguenots from France gathered to worship God in the Calvinist manner, and few churches in Christendom could have had a more devout membership