The Covenant (35 page)

It happened in several homes. Children were tricked into saying things of which they could have had no understanding, and away they went, to another town, in another district—and they would never be heard of again. “You warn your sons to be careful,” the minister said, and then came the anguished nights when mother and father secretly instructed their sons what to say.

“Do your parents lecture you at night?” one of the soldiers would ask the boys.

“No,” he must say.

“Did they ever take away pictures of the saints that you loved?”

“No.”

“Wouldn’t you like to attend Mass with other boys and girls?”

“We go to our own church.”

Now nights became sacred, for when the family was alone in their part of the house, and the soldiers rioting in theirs, Paul took out his Geneva Bible and patiently read from the Book of Psalms those five or six special songs of joy and dedication which the Huguenots had taken to their hearts:

And the elder De Prés drilled their sons in how to avoid the peril which menaced them: “Our lives would end if you were taken from us. Be careful, be careful what you say.”

In 1685 the axe which had been hanging over the Huguenots fell. King Louis XIV, judging himself to be impregnable, decided to rid himself of Protestants forever. With grandiloquent flourishes he revoked all concessions made to them by the Edict of Nantes and announced that henceforth France was a Catholic country with no place for Huguenots. Dragoons were dispatched to Languedoc, that ancient hiding place for heresy, and whole towns were depopulated. The massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day might have been reenacted across France, except that Louis did not want to inherit the moral stain of his forefathers.

Instead, a series of harsh decrees altered French life: “All Protestant books, especially Bibles in the vernacular, to be burned. No artisan to work anywhere in France without a certificate proving him to be a good Catholic. Every Huguenot clergyman to quit France within fifteen days and forever, on pain of death if he return. All marriages conducted in the Protestant faith declared null and all children there-from designated bastards. Protestant washerwomen not to work at the banks of the river, lest they sully the waters.”

And there was another regulation which the De Prés simply could not accept: “All children of Protestant families must convert immediately to the true faith, and any father who attempts to spirit his children out of France shall spend the rest of his life on the oar-benches of our galleys.”

What did these extraordinary laws mean in a village like Caix, where the population was mainly Huguenot? Since it had long been an orderly place, it did not panic. The pastor summoned the elders,
and when the deacons assembled, a large percentage of the adult males were present. “First,” said the minister, “we must ascertain if the rumor be true. Probably a lie, because four kings have assured us our freedom.”

But in due course official papers arrived, proving that the new laws were in effect, and a few families converted on the spot, parents and children noisily embracing the traditional faith. Other families met in conclave, and fathers swore that they would die with their infants rather than surrender them to Catholicism. “We’ll walk to the ends of the earth till we find refuge,” Paul de Pré cried flamboyantly, and when the pastor reminded him that the new edicts forbade taking either one’s self or one’s children out of France, De Pré astounded the assembly by shouting, “Then the new laws can burn in hell.”

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:

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 Pré 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 Pré family reported.

His name was Vermaas and he held two jobs, each of which proved crucial to De Pré: 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 than this. Each person who came to pray on Sunday was an authentic religious hero who had sacrificed position, security and wealth—and often the lives of family members—to persevere in Calvinism. Some, like the De Prés, had crept at night across two enemy countries or three in order to sing on Sundays the Psalm that Huguenots had taken specially to their hearts:

Amsterdam with its burgeoning riches and crowding fleets was indeed a large place, spacious in wealth and freedom, and Vermaas epitomized the spirit of the town, for he was a big man, burly in the shoulders and with a wide space between his eyes.

Intuitively he liked Paul de Pré, and when he learned how this resolute family had fled French tyranny, he embraced them. “There’s a good chance I can find you work at the weigh-house,” he assured Paul, and to Marie he said, “I know a little house near the waterfront. Not much, but it’s a foothold.”

Vermaas was master weigh-porter, and Paul sensed immediately the importance of this position. Never before had he seen such scales: huge timbered affairs with pans that weighed as much as a man, but so delicately balanced that they could weigh a handful of grain. To these scales, each taller than two men, came the riches of the Baltic. Stout little ships, manned by Dutch sailors, penetrated to all parts of that inland sea, selling and buying at a rate that would have dazzled a French businessman. At times the weigh-house would be occupied with timber from Norway; at other times copper, iron and steel from Sweden would predominate; but always there were tubs of North Sea herring waiting to be cured by a process known only by the Dutch, after which it would be transshipped to all the ports of Europe.

“Gold with fins,” the men at the weigh-house called their herring, and De Pré learned to tell when a ship with herring was about to unload; this was important, for when the workmen hauled in the tubs of gold, they were permitted to sequester a few choice fish for their families.

De Pré had deposited his wife and children in the miserable shack
near the banks of the IJ River, trusting that he would in time be able to find them better quarters. It was a vain hope, for Amsterdam was crowded with refugees from all parts of Europe: Baruch Spinoza, the brilliant Portuguese Jew, had lived here while unraveling the mysteries of God; he had died only a few years ago. René Descartes had elected to come here to conduct his work in mathematics and philosophy, and a score of great theologians from all countries had considered Amsterdam the only safe place to conduct their speculations. The English Pilgrims had rested nearby before sailing on to Massachusetts, and it was still the major center for the rescue of Jews from a score of different lands.

Houses were not easy to find, but with the aid of timber Paul acquired at the waterfront and cloths with which to stuff the windy cracks, he and Marie converted their shack into a livable home, and although the dampness caused much coughing, the family survived. The boys—Henri, six, and Louis, five—reveled in the canals that cut across the city and the endlessly changing river up which the Baltic ships came.

“The Golden Swamp” Amsterdam had been called in the old days, for it was then four-fifths water, but engineers were ingenious in filling in the shallow lakes to build more land. Son Henri’s first comment on his new home was apt, and the De Prés often quoted it: “I could get in a boat, if I had a boat, and row and row and never come back.” And every year men dug new canals, so that the city became a network in which every house was connected by water with every other, or so it seemed.

The French church, seated on one of the most interesting small canals, had started in 1409 as a Catholic cloister, but during the Reformation it was converted into a refuge for generations of fleeing dissidents. Rebuilt many times, it became a monument not only to Protestantism but also to the essential generosity of the Dutch, for its ministers, a courageous lot of French-speaking Walloons, who had dared much in coming here, had always been given pensions by the Dutch government on the grounds that “we are seekers after truth and are richer in having you among us.” No other nation in recorded history gave immediate pensions to its immigrants, or profited more from their arrival.

With pride Paul led his family to this church on Sundays, pointing out to the boys the various other Frenchmen who worked along
the waterfront. It was an impoverished congregation, with many families subsisting only through the generosity of Dutch patrons, but invariably someone in the group provided flowers for the altar, and it was because De Pré commented on this that his good fortune commenced.

One Monday morning, as Paul and Vermaas were hefting bales of cloth onto their weigh-scales, the big man said, “You like flowers, don’t you, Paul?”

“Where does the church always find flowers?”

“The Widows Bosbeecq send them over. They’re looking for someone to tend their garden.”

“Who are the widows?”

“Aloo! This one doesn’t know the Widows Bosbeecq!” And the workmen came to joke with him.

“What ship have you been unloading?” When De Pré pointed, the men cried, “That’s their ship. And that one and that one.”

It seemed that seven of the best ships sailing the Baltic belonged to the widows, and Vermaas explained, “Two country girls married the Bosbeecq brothers. The men were fine captains who worked the Baltic for many years. In time they had seven ships, like that one.”

“How did they die?”

“Fighting the English, how else?”

In 1667 the older Bosbeecq brother had accompanied the Dutch fighting fleet right into the river Thames, threatening to capture London itself; he had gone down with his ship the next year. The younger brother helped in three notable victories over the English, but he, too, had died at the hands of the English, and the family’s profitable trade with Russia might have evaporated had not the two widows stepped forward to operate the fleet. Choosing with rural skill those captains who would best preserve their profits, they continued to send their doughty potbellied vessels to all parts of the Baltic.

Sometimes the widows would appear at the docks, always together and with parasols imported from Paris, and would primly inspect whichever of their ships happened to be in the harbor, nodding sagely to their captains and approving of the manner in which their cargoes were being handled. They were in their sixties, somewhat frail, dressed in black. They walked carefully, attended by a maid who shoved idlers aside for them. One was tall and very thin; the other was roundish, always with a broad smile. Never once did they
complain about anything, but Vermaas assured De Pré that when they had their captains alone in the family office, they could be quite tart.