Nêne/Part 1/Chapter 4

HEY were of the same race, these two: Michael Corbier and Madeleine Clarandeau: an odd race, living in a little known corner of France.

At the time of the Revolution, when the King was guillotined, all the people hereabout—the Corbiers, the Clarandeaus, the Fantous and the others,—no longer all in the same politico-religious camp now—followed the lead of their beloved priests and rose for the King, in their ignorance and loyalty.

Though victorious in their first forward thrust, they soon came to grips with men of their own mettle. On both sides, under the leadership of gentle-eyed youths or stern-souled veterans, the struggle had been desperate.

To the Royalists' battle-cry or the strains of the Marseillaise, every town and village had been taken, re-taken, sacked and burned. There had been fighting in every sunken lane, in every patch of broom, in every clearing. There was not a parish even now, after more than a century, that did not have its "battle mound," its "grave of the Blue Coats" or its "Calvary of the Chouans."

In the end the peasants had been crushed. Other governments had come and conciliated the priests, pacified them so far that many of them had accepted the new state of affairs and taken oath of allegiance to the Republic.

Only the most bitter, the least politic among them had kept on the war in their hearts, and their flocks had followed them into their fierce isolation, into their disdainful disregard of threats and excommunications. But little by little these priests had died off and their flocks had been dispersed.

Now, after 120 years, there were few of these rebels, these Dissenters, left, except in the lowlands of the Vendée, where they had gathered in tiny communities—buffeted, crumbling away, but still not submerged by the flood tide of Catholicism.

Saint-Ambroise was the most important, compact and sturdy of these. It boasted 1,500 Dissenters. They had held their own, because they were a crowd living close together, and because they had the backing of the Protestants.

There was another hardy and vigorous sect, these Protestants. They had come from the country around Fontenay, where their ancestors had been among the first to accept Calvin's message. In those far-off days they had been numerous; sometimes a band of ruffians, and then again a meek and humble flock.

They had been ill treated under the kings, and the Vendéan Royalists had harried them too. They had hidden, scattered; yet here they were again, now hardly more than a thousand strong, settled partly at Saint-Ambroise, partly at Chantepie and Château-Blanc.

Now that they were no longer persecuted, they took to bickering among themselves. Eager for knowledge, they discussed the latest ideas and their own beliefs; following and outstripping their most advanced pastors, many of them drifted gradually toward irreligion. Some of them, however, from time to time, impelled by a wave of mysticism, reached toward primitive narrowness, toward anathemas, mortification of the flesh and the minatory texts of the Bible.

It was a strange countryside, with its two rival Protestant churches and its Dissenters' chapel, hemmed in by the arrogant chimes of the Catholic churches. All kinds of ancient traditions clashed here, and, although the years had mellowed many hard feelings, at times hate shot forth again into flame. The manner of speech varied from one household to another, as did the manner of dress, of food and of household arrangements, the games, the songs and amusements of the young. The Dissenters excited the liveliest curiosity; but they felt their souls were apart from the others, and, being afraid they might be laughed at, they kept much to themselves.

One time some gentlemen had come from town,—perhaps from Paris itself—who had cleverly overcome their reticence. Soon after, they had been written up in a newspaper. Their chapel was described as a big barn of a building, full of tin Saints and plaster Virgins. The writer had spoken not unpleasantly, but without due reverence, of their holy-water basin and their "museum,"—two things the Dissenters held very dear. Their holy-water basin was like all those that one sees in the Catholic churches, but with this difference, that it was never emptied. The water had been blessed by their last priest and that had been a long time ago. Since then, every day, a few drops of plain water were added, so that it should remain at the same level.

As for their "museum," it was a collection of little white animals, carved out of meat bones with a pocket knife by an old peasant who was famed for his piety. Granted, they were not as beautiful as the great statues they had in the city churches; still, they had "nothing like them in the churches of Saint Ambroise or Chantepie; and the very people who made fun of them would have been incapable of fashioning anything like them. Anyway, when you are invited into a house and made welcome there, you don't say, on leaving, that the fire smoked and the seats are rickety.

After this experience the chapel was closed to strangers. The Dissenters bent all their energies against being swamped by the Catholics. The last of their priests had gone and they scorned new priests as they would scorn traitors; so they conducted their services themselves. Perhaps from pride, or from a dim fear of erring on the wrong side, they accentuated their piety, kept all the Saints' days, doubled their days of fasting, observed Lent inexorably. And thus, forgotten heresies, and even ancient superstitions from the buried past, flourished on this rigid Christian faith as wall-flowers and St. John's wart sprout from the sides of an old wall. The women conducted the prayers, the young girls teaching the catechising. Faith in the healing power of mistletoe was revived and trees and springs were revered again.

The Dissenters rarely married outside their own group. They did not care to win over a Catholic by marriage, as such mixed marriages would only produce religious bastards, ready to betray them. But when one of themselves was baptised in the Catholic church, they mourned for him in their hearts.

It rarely happened that a girl thus renounced her faith, but there were always a number of lovestruck young men who allowed themselves to slip into the Catholic tide which never gave them up again. There had been such conversions in the Corbier family—a proud and rugged clan, in truth, but easily ruled by their passions. In the Clarandeau family, such a thing had never yet happened, but there was danger of it now. The son, the big chap who from childhood had been nicknamed Trooper because of his size and strength, was madly in love with a young dressmaker of Chantepie, one of the standard bearers of the "Children of Mary." True, he had promised his mother and Madeleine never to "change himself," but still they were not easy in their minds, knowing men to be weak and easily swayed.