But freedom’s battle, once begun,
Bequeathed from bleeding sire to son,
Though baffled oft, is ever won.
When the fair city of Lake Leman accepted the Reformation, she had already felt the glory and the glow of the rising sun of liberty. Some twenty years before, she had cast off the chains of a two-fold tyranny, which in truth was but one. For behind the crozier of the cruel, profligate prince-bishop were the sword and scepter of the Duke of Savoy; and bishop and duke together had pressed her down until the burden grew too heavy to be borne, and her citizens asked each other in shop and market-place, “Why should we bear it any longer?”
They were very capable of asking the question, and of finding the answer. Their faculties were trained and quickened by the social and municipal life of a busy town, by commerce, by skilful handicrafts, often by travel, sometimes by all of intellectual advantage the Age could offer — and it was the Age of the Renaissance. For them, as for most of their contemporaries, the Time was young; it was full of activity, of expectation, of promise — full also of the faults of youth, of rashness, audacity, and petulance, and of the ignorance which is absolutely sure of everything in heaven and upon earth.
Still, when the Time is young, it is well with those that are young also. Such was the lot of Ami Berthelier, the orphan of a wealthy citizen of Geneva, who had more than doubled his possessions by marriage with the heiress of one of the merchant princes of Augsburg, with whom he had business relations. The young Berthelier, educated at Padua, caught the spirit of the Renaissance, and learned to love well his classical lore, his Latin verses, his library, his “brown Greek manuscript.” But better still he loved the dream of free, regenerated Geneva. He was a young man of fashion, a student, a scholar, “but before all these he was a citizen of Geneva, and heart and soul a Huguenot. This name of honor and renown had as yet no religious significance; religion entered not at all into the thoughts of such men as Ami Berthelier; to them it meant merely the member of a league, at first and ostensibly a league of combourgeoisie with the friendly citizens of Fribourg, but really and ultimately a league for the defense of the ancient liberties of Geneva. His chief friends were the brilliant and versatile — Bonivard, the celebrated Prior of St. Victor, known to history; romance and poetry as the Prisoner of Chillon; Levrier, the incorruptible judge, most stainless of Genevan patriots and, above all, his own kinsman, Phillibert Berthelier.
This remarkable man was a typical tribune of the people. With them he jested, laughed, caroused, hiding his graver thoughts beneath a mask of frivolity. He became their idol; and he used all the influence thus obtained to inspire them with his own love of liberty, and to help them to obtain it. Whilst rendering a gay and careless homage, that all men saw, at the shrine of pleasure, the true devotion of his heart was kept for the altar of freedom, upon which he was ready, if need were, to offer up his own life also.
His young and wealthy cousin, Ami, chose to burn incense only at the nobler shrine. Early left independent by the death of his father, his tastes led him to prefer intellectual pursuits to grosser pleasures, and to fill his charming country house by the lake with scholars and students, rather than with boon companions. His mother died in his boyhood, but he was much attached to his only sister, ten years his junior; and it was well known that a yet more tender tie would one day unite him with the beautiful Yolande Levrier, nice and ward of the patriot judge.
All things were going well with him, when suddenly the storm broke, and the bolt fell that meant ruin. The detested prince-bishop, backed by the sword of Savoy and the influence of the Mamelukes (or friends of despotism in the town), made himself, in an evil hour, master of Geneva. A reign of terror followed, in which confiscation, imprisonment, torture, and death were the order of the day. Two of the protagonists of Genevan liberty, Berthelier and Levrier, died on the scaffold, both with undaunted courage, Levrier most like the devout Christian he seems to have been. The third, Bonivard, was thrown into the dungeon which his sufferings, and the immortal stanzas of the English poet, have made so famous. But there were others who bore their share in that great agony, though they missed the glory.
“They had no bard — and died.”
Very bitter was the cup borne to the lips of Ami Berthelier, well known as the devoted admirer and intimate friend of his great kinsman. As even a shred of evidence to convict the patriots of anything that could be called a crime was hard to find, desperate methods were used to obtain it. But neither rack nor pulley, neither chains, nor darkness, nor starvation could open the locked lips of the faithful disciple; though they broke his strong frame, turned his hair white, and added two-score years to his age. When at last deliverance came, it found him shattered in mind and body, a shadow of his former self. His wealth had been seized by the oppressors; only enough remained (husbanded and watched over by secret friends) to secure a frugal maintenance for whatever future might remain to him. Marguerite, an old servant of the family who had been his sister’s nurse, came back to him to manage his slender resources, in the modest dwelling-place his friends had obtained for him, consisting of the sage, or upper story of a house in the Rue Cornavin, of which the lower part was used as a store by a dealer in foreign fruits. His sister, when the evil days began, had found refuge with the nuns of St. Claire, to his great relief.
He came back like a ghost to the world of living men. Little life was left in him, and all there was seemed turned to bitterness. It must be a thing most terrible to walk in the furnace heated seven times without the presence of the Son of God. The marvel is that any do it, and survive. But inasmuch as Ami Berthelier, for all the anguish, had not sinned against his own soul, and betrayed the innocent, we may lope that One he saw not nevertheless stood by him unknown, nor ever quite forsook him, even when he doubted His very existence. Ami Berthelier went into his dungeon a careless semi-pagan of the Renaissance, with little faith to lose, but he came out of it a confirmed unbeliever, “having no hope, and without God in the world.”
A chill, hard despair of himself, of his country, of all men, had laid hold upon his soul. Even when the Reformation, the true sunrise of modem freedom, of which the others were but prophecies and promises, rose upon Geneva, he was as one to whom, after long agony of separation, his old love comes back again-and he does not know her.
The great Twenty — first of May” found him cold and unmoved. He stood, indeed, in the vast church of St. Peter, amongst the throng of citizens who lifted up their right hands and swore to be faithful to God and to His truth, now revealed to them, for the first time in His Holy gospel — but he raised no hand, he spoke no vow. The whole transaction was foreign to his consciousness, it had for him no meaning and no message.
He did not read the signs of the times. He set his face towards the sombre West, whence no light could come; and thus, though the East behind him was one blaze of sunrise glory, he could not see it.
The sons of Philibert Berthelier, and others of the old Huguenot party who had survived the persecution, or returned from their exile, came to visit him. But they were to him for the most part vanity and vexation of spirit. Some had thrown themselves heartily into the new movement; but others, led by the young Bertheliers, had quite as little liking for the Reformers as their fathers had for the prince-bishop. They reflected the lower, not the higher section of the old Huguenots; and Ami, though he had no objection to their irreligion, was revolted by their coarseness, and the license both of their speech and their practice.
Still, when in consequence of her acceptance of the Reformation there arose around Geneva a host of powerful enemies, who threatened her very existence, the fire of the old patriotism flamed up amidst its ashes. He, who thought that tears were no more for him, felt hot drops on the fingers that veiled his eyes from the sight of Genevan citizens marshaled to defend their homes, when he could not go with them to the fight. He gave out of his poverty to the defense, and but for Marguerite, would have starved himself to give still more. When the patriotic citizens destroyed their own suburbs, sacrificing their beautiful country houses and much of their wealth, to keep the enemy from finding a foothold there, he gladly abandoned his dwelling in the Rue Cornavin, which belonged to the suburb of St. Gervais, and came to a poor lodging in what was then called La Fusterie. In his narrow quarters there he gave shelter, as he told his sister, to a peasant and his wife, who were, like many others, left homeless by the destruction of the suburbs.
The peasant was a dull, honest fellow, of the class whom the citizens of Geneva contemptuously styled “Gray-feet,” living on and farming his own small plot of ground; the wife was a Savoyard, and far sharper. They had with them a babe, assumed to be their own. The unwholesome crowding of the town soon brought fever, and both the man and the woman took it and died. When the woman sickened the babe became Marguerite’s care, and to her when she felt herself dying, she confided that the child was not her own, but a babe of a gentle parentage which she had taken to nurse. This information Marguerite duly passed on to her master, who, however, scarcely listened to the tale, and soon forgot all about it. But he did not refuse her earnest request that she might keep the babe and nurse it. By the time they returned to the Rue Cornavin, which happily it had not been necessary to demolish, her nursling had become the great joy of her life.
Time passed on. Soon, all too soon as it seemed, there was no longer a babe to nurse, but a dark-eyed dark-haired child-maiden, full of mischief, to guard and guide — a little body, all life to the finger tips, to keep from falling into the fire or pulling the stools down upon itself, and a little active mind to keep from troubles of another kind and to feed in another way. The strange thing was, that this perplexing creature made up her mind to look for everything to Ami Berthelier himself. With the caprice of childhood, she was the tyrant of the devoted nurse who toiled for her night and day, and the adoring slave of the white-haired man who bestowed upon her an occasional, parenthetic notice. She watched for his look and his smile, employed all her pretty arts to attract his attention, and was lifted to the height of beatitude by a seat on his knee.
Berthelier liked it, of course; a child’s love is the sweetest of flatteries, as may be seen from the fact that no length of time ever obliterates the remembrance from the mind of its object. But as years went by he grew unhappy about the little Gabrielle. He knew she ought to be taught and trained, but he had not the smallest idea how to do it. Nor indeed had Marguerite, who could cook and wash with the best, but even with the needle her hands were unskillful. As for weightier matters, she could not read; and the kind of religious instruction which, as a devoted but not very enlightened follower of Calvin, she was disposed to give, did not seem to her master exactly food for babes. In all these things his own hands were empty of help. “Wellborn maidens,” he reflected, “should be taught to sew, to read, and to pray, and of these three desirable accomplishments he could impart but one.”
This was how, even to himself, he accounted for his appearance that August morning at the gate of the nuns of St. Claire. But the great deeps of the human heart lie far beneath the tide of consciousness. The touch of childish hands had been gradually awakening much within him which he thought was dead forever. Longings for the sister he had loved so well began to haunt him, growing ever stronger, till they took the likeness of those, the strongest of all, which wring our hearts for —
“The touch of a vanished hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still.”
Suddenly he remembered that his sister was not dead, that he could yet hear her voice, could yet touch her hand. Why, then, not try to do it?
His purpose grew and strengthened, and when the banishment of the nuns at St. Claire gave it opportunity, it bore fruit to action. But would the result be a success? For a season he was tempted to doubt it.
By his hearth, as one in a dream, sat a pale, bewildered woman, dressed now, not in conventional attire, but in the ordinary garb of a Genevan dame, and vainly trying to adjust herself to the new conditions, and the new conditions to herself, as a child puts together a difficult dissected puzzle.
In appearance she found her nurse far less changed than her brother; but the change in old Marguerite’s mind was one of the most perplexing of all the perplexing elements around her. She prayed, but she did not tell her beads like a Christian; she talked of religion, using long words, such as justification, regeneration, sanctification, which to her hearer might as well, or better, have been Latin, for then she would have believed they had a meaning, though she might not know what it was. Poor Claudine (no one called her Sister Agatha now) was of opinion that the world, since she left it, had gone quite mad!
Within doors and without, it was much the same. The streets were full of unknown perils; the rough market-women with their cries and quarreling, frightened her almost out of her senses; even the oxen being driven to the shambles the took at first for wild beasts. In the house she was scarcely more happy. Her brother was kind, and Marguerite duteous, but both treated her as the child which in all worldly matters she certainly was. Even little Gabrielle ignored her, after the unflattering custom of her kind towards a “grown-up” who is neither loved nor necessary. She sighed in secret for the convent. She even began to call herself an apostate, and to think she had committed the unpardonable sin.
Deliverance came to her; and through nothing greater than the torn garment of a child. One day Gabrielle ran to her in great distress with her holiday dress, a gay little petticoat of Lyons silk, torn down almost from waist to hem. She had been playing, she explained, with the bookbinder’s little boys next door, and Jeannot did it.
“The naughty varlet!” said Claudine. “But why dost thou play with those ill lads, Gabrielle? It is not seemly for a little maid.”
Gabrielle pouted. “Father lets me,” she said, and ran away, calling Marguerite.
At Claudine’s heart tugged the demon of jealousy. She fetched hastily a simpler dress for the child, and pursued her to the kitchen, where she found her climbing up on the table, to sit there and wait for Marguerite, who, as Claudine’s good star ordained, was just then at the market. “Let me put this on thee,” she said, “and see, Gabrielle, I will mend thy blue silk, before father comes home to take thee for that walk on the Molard he promised this morning.”
A little more coaxing and the blue silk was safe in her hands. The rent was a bad one; but under the skilful hand of the convent-taught needlewoman it was neatly and quickly repaired. Claudine, as she worked, could not help seeing that the garment was ill-made and fitting. I would alter it so, and so,” she thought, “and I would embroider the hem with that pretty stitch Sister Ursula taught me.”
As she planned, Marguerite came in, and looked with interested eyes. Presently she went into another room, returning with a great armful of little hoods, kirtles, bodices, tippets, and what not.
“To tell you the truth, damoiselle,” she said, “through these clothes of the little one the devil has had much advantage over me.”
“I no way misdoubt of it,” returned Claudine, with unusual energy; “though I think he makes much more use of Master Calvin’s heresies than of the petticoats of an innocent child.”
“I will not dispute with you, my damoiselle, seeing you are still, as one may say, in the gall of bitterness and in the bond of iniquity; but, all the same, that poor innocent’s green hood and blue kirtle agree no better than the Mamelukes and Huguenots used to do before the Gospel came to us — and she as proud of them all the time as a peacock of its tail or a papistical bishop of his crozier.” “Well, let us see what can be done,” said Claudine, diplomatically ignoring Marguerite’s offensive allusions.
“See then, my damoiselle, here is this bit of purple grosgrain Madame de Maisonneuve gave the master, wherewith to make for her a little coat for Sundays and holidays. ‘Tis a beauty, is it not? She will like to see it on her; but I could never make my mind up to cut it, since, if scissors go wrong, ‘tis a sin with no place of repentance.”
Thus Claudine, the skilled needlewoman, found her vocation, and was troubled with no more fears about the unpardonable sin. Still she continued, in the Protestant city, at heart a devout Catholic. With all the strength of her nature (not great at the best), she longed for the sacraments of her church, especially for the Mass, at that time interdicted there. Once or twice she received religious consolations from a priest in disguise, whom her brother found out accidentally, and in his good-natured indifference invited to visit her. With Berthelier’s consent she taught Gabrielle her own prayers and the elements of her own creed; to the infinite disgust of Marguerite, who did all in her power to counteract the mischief, taking the child, whenever she could, to St. Peter’s to hear Master Calvin, and trying to impress his doctrines on her young mind. Outside of both himself, Berthelier looked on with quiet amusement at the battle of the Creeds. He knew that anything like an open adherence to Catholicism would expose Gabrielle, when she grew up, to very great practical inconveniences, if she remained in Geneva; but he never doubted that his sister’s pretty superstitions, as he thought them, would drop off from her when she came to years of discretion, and that she would think and believe like every one about her. Meanwhile, he did not care who won the victory; not realizing that in such battles it is apt to go hard with the young souls that are fought for, and for whom everything is so real, so earnest.
As for Gabrielle, to whose childish mind the preaching at St. Peter’s did not appeal, she inclined at first to the teaching of “Tante Claudine,” as she learned to call her. She became very fond of the gentle, kindly woman; although from first to last “Father” reigned in her heart without a rival.
In the larger world without, as in the young heart of Gabrielle, rival forces were fighting for the victory. It is true that, to our modem thinking, that world itself was a microcosm. The Czar Paul, the ruler of fifty millions, contemptuously styled a civil conflict in Geneva “a tempest in a tumbler of water!” and the yet more scornful Voltaire averred that whenever he dressed his perruque he powdered the whole Republic. Yet the little State was destined to illustrate in her own history that doctrine of theology which her greatest divine so definitely formulated, that (although by no means peculiar to him, nor held more strongly by him than by many others) it has gone thenceforward by his name. Because the sublime and simple thought elect,” — chosen of God, has been hardened into dogma, compressed into the bounds of system, and sometimes even distorted into absolute falsehood, it is not therefore the less grand or the less true. The brave little city by the lake was as really elect — or chosen — of God as the Zion of old in which He put His Name. She was chosen to receive His Word, and to show to all the world the spectacle of a community honestly endeavoring to obey it. She was chosen to be a city of refuge for His persecuted servants throughout all Christendom, who thronged to her gates as to a very haven of rest, where they might dwell safely, and fear no evil. Let Mine outcasts dwell with thee,” was God’s special charge to Geneva; and she heard and obeyed.
It needed deep religious convictions, as well as heroic courage, for the little State to brave the anger of her powerful neighbors by receiving and sheltering these refugees. Moreover, not without much personal self-denial, on the part of her citizens, could so great a concourse of strangers be maintained. Yet the kindness was amply repaid; Geneva found it indeed more blessed to give than to receive. Not merely because the “gentle and honest strangers” contributed to her population a most valuable element, greatly increasing her moral and intellectual strength, but also because, through her sacrifices for them, she was saved from the dangers of a morbid austerity and asceticism. Her earnest spirits shared with their contemporaries the tendency to look on the darker and sterner side of religion and of life, and the powerful genius of the man who inspired and dominated them tended also in the same direction. But practical benevolence has a broadening influence on character. Fasting for its own sake may tend to narrowness; but fasting to feed the hungry enlarges the heart, and heart and mind are interdependent. This work of ministry for God’s outcasts lent the stern regime of Calvinistic Geneva a grace and a glory it would otherwise have lacked. Perhaps it could not save it wholly from the hardness of fanaticism, but it certainly redeemed it from its selfishness.
But before the little city could accept and fulfill her mission, she had to be trained and educated, and purged from the elements irreconcilable with it. These were twofold. The worst foes of true order and of true liberty (which in their essence are but one), are a false order, which is slavery, and a false freedom, which is license. In throwing off the yoke of Rome, Geneva had emancipated herself from the first; she had still before her a long and bitter struggle with the second, represented by the party known in history as the Libertines.
But the final act of this drama did not take place for years after the events which made the little Gabrielle and the nun of St. Claire joint inmates of the house of Ami Berthelier.