Page:A book of the Cevennes (-1907-).djvu/54

26 age of some saint. Each of these congregations had its hall, and in this gathered the wives and daughters of the absent men, and spent their days and evenings in making pillow-lace, in singing, telling tales, and in gossip. There they remained working at their little squares with flying bobbins, till the spring sun brought back fathers and husbands and brothers, when the women put aside their bobbins and returned to their several farms.

Lacemaking was a flourishing business till the year 1547, when a sumptuary law was promulgated by the Parliament of Toulouse and sanctioned by the King, forbidding the wearing of lace by any save nobles, for the odd reason that there was no means of obtaining domestic servants in Le Velay, as every girl was a lace-maker.

Great consternation was caused by this edict. That same year a late frost smote the vines, corn was dear, and a pestilence broke out. In the midst of this discontent, Huguenot preachers appeared in the land, and they did their utmost to direct the disaffection of the people against the Church. Happily, S. Francis Regis arrived in Le Velay on a preaching mission, and speedily saw that the limitations imposed on the production of lace was the real grievance angering the people and inducing them to hit out blindly at all authority. He hurried to Toulouse and obtained the withdrawal of the law. He did more: his brethren of the Jesuit Order, incited by him, spread abroad the passion for lace in the New World, became in fact commis voyageurs for the industry, and thus opened out fresh fields for the produce. It is due to this that the memory of S. Francis Regis is still fragrant in the