“He might have had the world with him,
But chose to side with suffering men
And had the world against him.”
—BROWNING
IF Gaspard had followed—as very gladly he would have done—the footsteps of the man he called Monsieur Beauclaise, he would often have found him in less comfortable quarters than by the brigands’ fire in the wood of Besogne. To take one experience from amongst many in the annals of that life of peril and suffering. On a cold night of the winter which followed his meeting with Gaspard, he was keenly pursued by his ever-watchful foes, and tracked to the house of one of the faithful in which he had found shelter. Presently his host, in great alarm, told him the soldiers were coming.
“There is one place—only one—I can hide you in,” he said; and he led his dangerous guest into the garden, where was a deep well. Invisible from the mouth, and just above the water-level, was a small excavation, into which the hunted man, let down by a rope, could just contrive to squeeze himself. He was not a moment too soon in doing it, for a hundred and twenty soldiers, armed to the teeth, were surrounding the place, and with loud threats demanding the pastor. Resistance was useless, and the host attempted none; he opened his doors and invited them to seek for him as they would. They ransacked every corner, of course without success. Still they swore he was there; he had been seen to enter, and could not have come forth unseen. At last one of them, who had heard of such places of concealment, suggested the well, and offered valiantly to go down by a rope and search it. His offer was accepted, but a plunge into the ice-cold water was the sole reward of his courage. He was drawn up shivering, and protesting that no living thing was there. So for that time the pastor escaped. On another occasion he got out of the town of Nimes by creeping through a sewer; and through the gate of Sedan he passed in safety in the disguise of a porter with a burden on his shoulder. In the wild country of the Cevennes his adventures were numerous—such as nights of violent rain or piercing cold spent in the open, or on one occasion, under a rock, in a space too small to sit, stand, or lie in. Yet none of these things moved him, nor availed one jot to abate his enthusiasm for the calling to which he had vowed himself.
It was not the calling to which he had been destined in his youth, and which in his early manhood he had followed with signal honor and success.
When Gaspard de Montausier was still in his infancy, Paul Beauclaise, whose real name was Claude Brousson, was already passing through some of the crucial scenes of his strange, checkereda career.
The great hall of the Parliament of Toulouse was crowded to its utmost capacity. There, from all Languedoc, were counts and barons, knights and gentlemen, the noblesse of the Sword—with judges and high officials, the noblesse of Robe; and, more stately than either, archbishops, bishops, and abbes, the noblesse of the Church. Great also was the gathering of priests and monks, and above all of Jesuits, for the cause to be tried that day was, in their own estimation, emphatically theirs. And high were their hopes of a victory, signal and decisive. Still their opponents, though vastly in the minority, were not unrepresented. There mingled in the crowd a fair number of nobles, gentlemen, and citizens who belonged to what was then styled officially “the pretended Reformed Religion.”
For this “cause célebre” was a test case for the Protestants of Southern France. Their great temple at Montauban (the Protestant places of worship were always called “temples”) had been closed, on the pretext that one of the royal edicts had been violated by the admission to the Protestant service of five converts to Catholicism. But friend and foe alike knew that this was but one drop of the thunder shower of calamity about to descend upon them. Nor was it the first. Already forty-two of their temples had been closed, upon various pretexts, false in most cases, and frivolous in all. The king willed it (“le roi le vent”), and was not the king as God upon earth? The priesthood, from the archbishops and bishops down to the humblest cure, willed it also. So did many others, and so, especially, did the populace of the great towns. Here in Toulouse, the most fanatically Catholic city of all France, the unreasoning passions of the mob were all enlisted in the cause of the Church of Rome.
Still, the five pastors of Montauban had dared to make appeal to the Parliament of Languedoc, which met in Toulouse; and though they paid for their temerity with imprisonment, their appeal was heard. For the Protestants, though already oppressed and outraged in a thousand ways, were not yet formally outlawed.
The Procureur-General having ended his long and violent harangue, the advocate of the Protestants stood up to answer him. He was Claude Brousson, a native of Nimes, an advocate and doctor of law. Still comparatively young, he was already well known for his eloquence and legal acumen. He wore his doctor’s robe, and the indispensable perruque hid his dark hair and shaded his grave and quiet face. Quiet, too, and apparently free from emotion, was the voice in which he began. He made a clear and reasonable statement of facts, proving that the terms of the king’s edict, which required that all “conversions” should be officially notified to the Protestant pastors, had not been complied with in the case before the Court. Moreover, one of the “relapsed” had never returned to the temple at all, and the other four had returned before the publication of the king’s edict. There was, therefore, no case against the Protestants, and no justification for the suppression of their temple. Then, rising from the particular to the general, the calm exponent of facts became the impassioned advocate of principles. He went boldly to the heart of the matter for—let friend or foe disguise it as he might—both knew that he was fighting for the very existence of Protestantism in France. To that bitterly hostile audience he dared to explain what the Protestant Faith really was, its loyalty to Christ, its conformity to Scripture, its simple and evangelical worship, its pure and lofty morality.
At last the public prosecutor interrupted him, crying out angrily, “Do you imagine, sir, that you are speaking in a temple?”
“I do, sir,” replied the intrepid advocate. “I am speaking in the temple of Justice, where the voice of Truth should always be heard.” Then, turning to the Court, he asked respectfully, “May I be permitted to continue?”
So far had the power of his eloquence prevailed that even that fanatical assembly bade him go on.
He went on without further interruption, and obtained the triumph signal under the circumstances of a suspended verdict. The Court could not decide against him, and would not—perhaps dared not—decide for him.
When the assembly dispersed, the Procureur-General came to the side of his bold opponent, and stretched out his hand to him. “I do not despair,” said he, “of seeing you one day a good Catholic.”
“You see how I am on the way to it,” returned Claude Brousson, no doubt with a quiet smile.
The intrepid defender of the Protestants had one more triumph. Once more, a little later, he was allowed to raise his voice before the same illustrious assembly upon this second occasion even more illustrious—on behalf of temples illegally closed and pastors unjustly banished. Such causes, good though they might be in law and equity, could not then be gained in France. Yet the impression produced was profound. It may be guessed from the fact that immediately afterward a Jesuit who was present rose from his seat and impulsively embraced the Huguenot orator, crying out, “You have edified me, sir, you have greatly edified me.”
After the assembly, the magnates of Church and State met in conclave. Not to judge the case—that was pre-judged—but to discuss the fate of the dauntless advocate. “We are doing all we can to suppress heresy,” they said to each other, “and this man comes and preaches it to our very faces.”
“Arrest him at once!” said the majority; but the President of the Parliament pleaded for milder measures. “Allow me to deal with him,” he said. And he did so. But his offers of preferment, which would have opened out before the advocate a splendid career, proved as vain as threats and menaces would assuredly have been.
No longer allowed to defend the persecuted community, Brousson devoted his energies to the task of organizing, inspiring, and strengthening it, so that it might present a courageous and united front to its enemies.
But perils thickened round him. Whilst he was zealously pursuing this work in his native city of Nimes, troops were sent to arrest him. After several marvelous escapes, he finally got out of the town, as has been said, by creeping through a sewer belonging to the House of the Jesuits.
He reached Switzerland in safety; and there he took up the cause of the multitude of exiles who had escaped from France, for the most part in poverty and destitution. He found abundant use for his eloquence in pleading for them, and he was very successful, especially in Switzerland and Germany. In particular, the Elector of Brandenburg, an ancestor of the present Emperor of Germany, became the warm friend of the exiles and of their advocate.
But the cry of agony from his native land was forever sounding in the ear of Brousson. Those poor sheep, left in the wilderness with the ravening wolves around them—whom had they to bind up that which was torn, to seek that which was lost, to bring the living water to that which was dying of thirst? The shepherds—where were they? Driven from the land, forbidden to re-enter it under the awful penalty, not of death alone, but of the lingering torture of the wheel. And yet Claude Brousson—no pastor, but an advocate and doctor of law—was bold enough to address a letter to the exiled pastors, entreating that some of them would return and minister to their flocks! It was not difficult to find reasons for declining, and it may be that one pastor voiced the feeling of others when he asked the natural question, “Then why don’t you go yourself?”
“If God had given me your talents, I think I would,” the great advocate answered, modestly.
Claude Brousson was no pastor. Moreover, he was fully employed in work of the utmost importance, which none other could do so well. Yet this was not the first voice that had come to him, calling upon him to volunteer for the forlorn hope of the Church. He heard the piteous cries of the suffering people, for “on the side of their oppressors there was power, and they had no comforter.” And he heard another Voice, he saw a beckoning Hand, which those who have the unsealed ear and the open eye seldom fail to hear and see—nor to obey, however strong may be the opposing influences. In this case they were exceptionally strong. By no means would the layman intrude upon the pastoral office, for which he had not been set apart in the appointed way. And beside the strong claims of the work he had already undertaken, there were the yet stronger and more tender claims of a beloved wife and son, of kinsfolk and of friends whose support and maintainer he was. There was also the natural shrinking—we cannot doubt it—of a sensitive, refined and scholarly nature, used to the sheltered life of the study and the law courts, from hardships and perils worse than those of Tardif and his comrades, and probably culminating in that form of death which was almost the only thing these daring outlaws absolutely dreaded.
Still, he went—although not until after a struggle so severe that it ended in a dangerous illness. Drawn by the magnet of love, love to God and to his suffering brethren, he made three missionary journeys—rightly called apostolates—into France, the first extending over a period of nearly seven years. He soon received, in an abandoned sheep-cote among the wild mountains of the Cevennes, the “laying on of the hands of the presbytery,” which entitled him to preach, and to administer “the Sacraments of the New Covenant.” This office was performed for him by two heroic pastors, who had dared to remain in the country.
The story of his three apostolates, if told in detail, would furnish hairbreadth escapes and heroic adventures sufficient to inspire more romances than one. Yet from the first two the daring evangelist had returned in safety, though with shattered health and exhausted frame. “Now indeed,” said those who loved him, “he may rest from his labors.” It was said especially, and with many tears, by the devoted wife whose sorrows and anxieties, during his absence, he had consoled so tenderly in his letters—whenever letters could possibly be sent. All that he was able to do for Christ, he told her, was her work as well as his, “for,” said he, “I am a part of yourself!”
Perhaps this time he might have yielded, had not the Peace of Ryswick, just then concluded, dealt what seemed a death-blow to the hopes of the Huguenots. They had expected that the Treaty between Louis XIV. and the Protestant powers of England and Holland would have included some stipulation in their favor.
Nor indeed were they forgotten during the negotiations. The Protestant plenipotentiaries interceded warmly in their favor; but Louis returned the cold and inflexible answer, “I do not pretend to dictate to William in what manner he should govern his own subjects, nor can he pretend to dictate to me.”
At the conclusion of the treaty, with no help in it for them, there arose from the suffering community—not indeed “a great and bitter cry,” for scarce, in those cruel days, did they dare even to cry aloud—but what was worse—a low, brokenhearted wail of anguish, perhaps of despair. It reached one ear at least, that of Claude Brousson. He could no longer forbear: go to them he must, and at least try to bring them the consolations of Him who “bindeth up the broken in heart.”
So once more he went to France, this time to his beloved South. He traveled under the name of Paul Beauclaise, though the alias was but a feeble protection to a man whose personality was so well known, and upon whose head a heavy price was set.
Paul Beauclaise, therefore, it was who, in the course of his wanderings, met a lost lamb of his flock in the lair of the robbers, acting the part of a young smuggler of salt.