Paris: The Novel

which continue to bleed in secret.
    And now Amélie was in love. She was not yet twenty. Her mother had discovered the state of her feelings the day before, and had asked him to talk to her.
    “My child,” he said, firmly, but as kindly as possible, “You can’t marry this man, you know.”
    She stared at him miserably.
    “Is he intending to ask for your hand?”
    “He loves me. I am sure he loves me.”
    He smiled at her fondly and shook his head. The whole business was absurd, but he knew that didn’t make it any easier for Amélie.
    If only Geneviève’s sister hadn’t married a tradesman, none of this would have happened. In all likelihood, Amélie would never have met Pierre Renard. But of course, when she went to see her cousins, she met all sorts of townspeople like him, whom she would not have been familiar with in her own home.
    Pierre Renard was a pleasant, handsome man in his late twenties. He was a younger son, but his family were modestly wealthy. Any young girl might have fallen in love with him.
    But he couldn’t marry Amélie.
    In the first place, he was a Protestant. Until late in the reign of Henry IV, his forebears had been good Catholics. But then his grandfather had married a second wife who was Protestant and converted himself. Pierre’s father had built up a considerable fortune, but never returned to the Catholic faith. Whether nineteen-year-old Amélie, seriously in love for the first time, imagined that she could convert her husband back to the true faith, or whether she planned to become a heretic herself, d’Artagnan did not know. He didn’t even need to find out.
    For a second objection overrode even the religious one. Pierre Renard was not noble.
    “I couldn’t let you lose everything that your nobility gives you, my child,” he told her. “When you are older you will thank me for saving you and your children from such a terrible and permanent blow.”
    It was true that he was saving her from herself. But there was another thought, equally important, in his mind. Whatever the circumstances of her birth, she bore his name. His family honor was at stake. No one bearing the name of d’Artagnan was going to marry out of the nobility.
    “You must put this young man out of your thoughts, Amélie, and you must not see him again.”
    As she left the room, he could see that she was about to weep, but there was nothing else to be done.
    His eldest son and daughter were both married, quite happily, into noble families like his own. He’d known that it was time to find a husband for Amélie too. This little incident was a reminder that he’d better make a start.
    The letter he had received that morning came at an opportune moment, therefore. He decided to reply to it at once.

    The following days were hard for Amélie. When she had confessed to her mother that she was in love, she hadn’t told her everything.
    The crisis had begun after she confided her feelings for Pierre Renard to her cousin Isabelle. Isabelle had told her brother Yves, who’d discovered from Pierre that he was in love with Amélie, but that since she was both noble and Catholic, and he couldn’t abandon his Protestant faith, he thought there was no hope. Isabelle had passed this information back to Amélie.
    “If he asked me, I’d probably elope with him,” said Amélie.
    “But what about his religion?” Isabelle had objected.
    It was certainly true that in the last few years, life had become much more difficult for the Huguenot community. Louis XIV believed the old adage: “The people follow the faith of their king.” He liked order. Protestants in a Catholic country meant disorder. And he could point to the earlier troubles in France and in many other countries to prove his assertion.
    King Henry IV’s Edict of Nantes had protected the Huguenots for more than eighty years. But nowadays, the Sun King was putting more and more pressure on them to convert. He’d even started quartering cavalry troops in Protestant households, making the owners’ lives a misery. And there was every sign that the persecutions were likely to get worse.
    “You’d have to be mad to become a Protestant now,” Isabelle told her.
    But Amélie was too much in love to care.
    She didn’t care that he wasn’t noble either. When she looked at the lives of her cousins, they seemed quite happy, living without the social burdens and prohibitions that were the price to be paid for a noble’s pride and tax reliefs.
    Wisely,