abroad, braving all dangers, even that of the galleys in case of arrest.  The Duke of La Force had abjured, then repented of his abjuration, only to relapse again.  One of his cousins, seventy-five years of age, was taken to the galleys.  He had for his companion Louis de Marolles, late king’s councillor.  “I live just now all alone,” wrote the latter to his wife.  “My meals are brought from outside; if you saw me in my beautiful convict-dress, you would be charmed.  The iron I wear on my leg, though it weighs only three pounds, inconvenienced me at first far more than that which you saw me in at La Tournelle.”  Files of Protestant galley-convicts were halted in the towns, in the hope of inspiring the obstinate with a salutary terror.

The error which had been fallen into, however, was perceived at court.  The stand made by Protestants astounded the superintendents as well as Louvois himself.  Everywhere men said, as they said at Dieppe, “We will not change our religion for anybody; the king has power over our persons and our property, but he has no power over our consciences.”  There was fleeing in all directions.  The governors grew weary of watching the coasts and the frontiers.  “The way to make only a few go,” said Louvois, “is to leave them liberty to do so without letting them know it.”  Any way was good enough to escape from such oppression.  “Two days ago,” wrote M. de Tesse, who commanded at Grenoble, “a woman, to get safe away, hit upon an invention which deserves to be known.  She made a bargain with a Savoyard, an ironmonger, and had herself packed up in a load of iron rods, the ends of which showed.  It was carried to the custom-house, and the tradesman paid on the weight of the iron, which was weighed together with the woman, who was not unpacked until she was six leagues from the frontier.”  “For a long time,” says M. Floquet, “there was talk in Normandy of the Count of Marance, who, in the middle of a severe winter, flying with thirty-nine others on board a fishing-smack, encountered a tempest, and remained a long time at sea without provisions, dying of hunger, he, the countess, and all the passengers, amongst whom were pregnant women, mothers with infants at the breast, without resources of any sort, reduced for lack of everything to a little melted snow, with which they moistened the parched lips of the dying babes.”  It were impossible to estimate precisely the number of emigrations; it was probably between three and four hundred thousand.  “To speak only of our own province,” writes M. Floquet in his Histoire du Parlement de Normandie, “about one hundred and eighty-four thousand religionists went away; more than twenty-six thousand habitations were deserted; in Rouen there were counted no more than sixty thousand men instead of the eighty thousand that were to be seen there a few years before.  Almost all trade was stopped there as well as in the rest of Normandy.  The little amount of manufacture that was possible