Night, with fold on fold of ragged purple, with wide obliterating hand, came roughly down upon the ancient city of Rochelle, which seemed slowly to draw itself together and assume the proportions of a huge, menacing rock.  Of the roof lines, but lately of many hues and reaches, there now remained only a long series of grotesque black profiles which zigzagged from north to south, from ruined wall to ruined wall.  The last dull silver gleam of day trembled a moment on the far careening horizon, then vanished; and presently the storm which had threatened all through the day broke forth, doubly furious.  A silent stinging snow whipped in from the sea, and the lordly voices of the surges rose to inharmonious thunders in the straits of Antioch, or burst in rugged chorus against the rock-bound coasts of the gloomy promontory and the isles of Re and Oleron.  As the vigor of the storm increased, the harbor towers Saint Nicholas and the Chain, looming in the blur like suppliant arms, and the sea walls began gradually to waver and recede in the accumulating haze, while across the dim yellow flame in the tower of the Lantern the snow flurried in grey, shapeless, interminable shadows.  Hither and thither the wind rushed, bold and blusterous, sometimes carrying landward the intermittent crashing of the surf as it fell, wrathful yet impotent, on the great dike by which, twenty-odd years before, the immortal Richelieu had snuffed the last heroic spark of the Reformists.

The little ships, the great ships, the fisherman’s sloop, the king’s corvette, and the merchantman, all lay anchored in the basin and harbor, their prows boring into the gale, their crude hulls rising and falling, tossing and plunging, tugging like living things at their hempen cables.  The snow fell upon them, changing them into phantoms, all seemingly eager to join in the mad revel of the storm.  And the lights at the mastheads, swooping now downward, now upward, now from side to side, dappled the troubled waters with sickly gold.  A desert of marshes behind it, a limitless sea before it, gave to this brave old city an isolation at once splendid and melancholy; and thrice melancholy it stood this wild March night, witnessing as it did the final travail of winter, pregnant with spring.

At seven o’clock the ice-clad packet from Dieppe entered the harbor and dropped anchor.  Among those who disembarked were two Jesuit priests and an Iroquois Indian, who immediately set out for the episcopal palace.  They passed unobserved through the streets, for the blinding, whirling snow turned them into shadow-shapes, or effaced them totally from sight.  Besides, wayfarers were few and the hardy mariners had by this time sought the warm chimney in the favorite inn.  For well they knew that there were times when God wished to be alone with His sea; and he was either a poor Catholic or a bad Huguenot who refused to be convinced that the Master had contrived the sea and the storm for His own especial pastime.