Paris: The Novel

she didn’t say any of this to her parents.
    But she thought of Pierre. She thought of him constantly. She yearned just to be in his presence. If only she could talk to him.
    What a fool she’d been to confess her secret to her mother. She had little doubt that her cousins would have let Pierre know her feelings for him by now. If she’d just kept her mouth shut with her mother, she and Pierre might have met at her cousins’ house, just as they had before. She could have given him an opening. They might have reached an understanding. Even if he’d told her that love between them was impossible, that would have been something. He could have told her that he loved her all the same.
    Instead of which, she was left in doubt. Her parents were keeping her away from her cousins, so there was no news from them. She kept hoping, foolishly, that he would appear, that he’d come to the house to see her father and ask for her hand. He might be refused, but the fact that he’d come would have meant the world to her. She knew it made no sense. Her father’s house lay a short way west of the Cardinal’s Palace—the Palais Royal as it was called now—and she’d stare out her window moodily into the rue Saint-Honoré, in case he should go by. If he’d come to the window with a ladder, she’d have scrambled onto it. An even more absurd idea. But she couldn’t help it. These were her sad daydreams.

    It was on a Friday in mid-October that her mother came into her bedroom and gave her a strange look.
    “There is news that you should know, Amélie. Yesterday the king took a great decision. He is revoking the Edict of Nantes. It will become law on Monday.”
    “What will that mean for the Protestants?” Amélie asked.
    “They will all be forced to become Catholic. The king is sending troops to all the main routes out of the kingdom to stop the Huguenots from escaping.”
    “Then Pierre Renard will be a Catholic.”
    “No doubt.” She looked at her daughter sadly. “It won’t help you, Amélie. He still won’t be a noble.”
    On Monday, the Revocation became law.
    On Wednesday, her aunt Catherine came to the house, accompanied by Isabelle. Amélie anxiously took Isabelle to one side to ask if there was any news of Pierre Renard.
    “You haven’t heard?”
    “I’ve heard nothing.”
    “Pierre Renard has vanished.” Isabelle took her by the arm. “You’d better forget him, Amélie. The whole family’s gone. Nobody knows where they are. But I don’t think he’ll be coming back.”

    All over France, a similar pattern could be found. Some families acted at once, others waited for months. But the Edict of Fontainebleau, as the king’s order was called, had just made their lives impossible.
    All Protestant churches were to be destroyed and any Protestant religious meeting, even a small group in a private house, was illegal. The participants would have all their property seized. Any child born to a Protestant parent was to be baptized Catholic and sent to Catholic schools. Failure would mean a huge fine of five hundred livres. Protestant ministers had two weeks to renounce their faith or leave France. If caught after that, they’d be sent to the galleys. Ordinary members of the Protestant congregation trying to leave France would be arrested. Men to the galleys, women stripped of all their possessions.
    It was totalitarian. It was comprehensive. A century before, the Massacreof Saint Bartholomew’s Day had been a horror. But the machinery of Louis XIV’s centralizing state was far more thorough. The Protestants were smashed. Large numbers, having no other option, converted to Catholicism. Perhaps a million converted in this way.
    And yet, miraculously, hundreds of thousands managed to leave. Taking quiet roads, walking through woods, hiding in wagons and barges, hundreds of thousands of them managed to slip over the borders into the Netherlands, Switzerland or Germany. Others got out through Huguenot ports before the king could block them. They ran huge risks in doing so, and they had to be careful. But for all his power and all his troops, the Sun King could not stop them. France was too big, the Huguenots too many. Like the mass migration of Puritans from England to America, fifty years before, about two percent of the population, including some of the most skilled, were lost to their country, and gained by others.
    The Renard family, by acting swiftly, had shown much wisdom. Without a word to their