parties would have begun. "Besides," she |
added at length, perceiving that none of
these arguments moved him, "they will
certainly think that you wish to go there
now because I am going."

But it was with no apprehension of being rebuffed that Archdale went to call upon Lady Wetherby on the following day. Experience, by the light of which we are all wont to steer (and a poor sort of light it is, though perhaps the best obtainable), had long ago taught him that he could get almost anything that he wanted This sort of pleading, which he had by asking for it prettily, and, although he found effective in other quarters, was not was not very warmly received, it was with quite the best that he could have adopted all his usual self-confidence and cheerful-in his present difficulty, and he would no ness that he began,

thing more unfounded and ridiculous! | tion" for non-Catholics registered by the Why, I shall be daubing away at the walls Parliament of Paris. pretty nearly all day long!"

66

My good fellow,' "answered Lord Wetherby, "if you aren't afraid of Mrs. Brett, I don't think we need be alarmed on her account. Mrs. Brett can take pretty good care of herself. By all means, come whenever it suits you; only don't blame me if you get a broken heart for your pains."

And as Rabaut Saint-Etienne, the Protestant pastor whose glory it is to have obtained that edict, became one of the "Fathers of the Revolution," the "Men of 1789" as the phrase is, we shall make no apology for offering for the centenary of 1789 our sketch of a life that touches at its beginning the dragonnades of the old régime, and at its end the worship of the Goddess of Reason under the new.

Archdale seized his advantage with commendable promptitude. "Thanks aw- Jean-Paul Rabaut, called Saint-Etienne, fully," said he, "that's all right, then. I'll was born in 1743, the eldest son of the make my preparations, and drop you a line" Desert Pastor," Paul Rabout, almost as soon as I'm ready to begin. Goodbye. ." And he was out of the house before another word could be uttered.

Lady Wetherby had an admirable temper, but this was more than she could stand. "Everybody knows," she told her husband, "that you have no discrimination, but I really do think that, for my sake if for no one else's, you might have snubbed that man. How he can have the impudence to accept an invitation which I had just refused point-blank to give him, passes my comprehension !

"He is a little bit cheeky, perhaps," agreed Lord Wetherby, with a meditative smile.

"Cheek is no word for it! Well, since you have asked him, I suppose he must come; but I warn you, that I shall turn him out of the house without ceremony if he doesn't behave himself. I only hope and trust that people won't hear what an idiotic thing we have done."

From The Gentleman's Magazine.

the last survivor of the heroic age of Huguenotism. It was now more than half a century since Louis XIV. turned his "booted apostles " loose upon the Huguenots; but the persecution, though not quite in its first heat, was still far from being over. Paul Rabaut was a fugitive hiding in caves and thickets; attempts were made to seize his wife as a hostage, and during a hasty flight her child was born in a barn or stable. Throughout his childhood Jean-Paul never knew till supper-time where he should sleep; his father regulated the march, and the children were lodged on the faithful in turn. At the age of eleven he was awaked one morning by a troop of grenadiers demanding entrance to the house where his mother had taken refuge. The next year we find him safe in Geneva, boarding with a refugee pastor, and, later on, transferred to the Lausanne College, which Antoine Court, the "Restorer of the Huguenot Church,' had founded for training Desert pastors. Jean-Paul's inclination seems to have been towards the bar,† but, as the professions in France were closed to Huguenots, he

A FRENCH PROTESTANT DURING THE resigned himself to entering the ministry.

REVOLUTION:

RABAUT SAINT-ETIENNE.

The "Desert" was the wild region of Languedoc and the Cévennes, where Huguenotism lingered after it "Homme libre, chrétien, Républicain par choix, né had been crushed out of the towns. Every pastor pour aimer mon frère et servir ma patrie." adopted for safety a nom de Désert, or alias, by which he was known among the faithful. Paul Rabaut had at ENGLISH Protestants rejoiced in the least a dozen "Desert names" of his own, and had opportunity of commemorating, during given to his three sons in childhood those of SaintEtienne, Pommier, and Dupuis. To call them by their 1888, two anniversaries at once that of father's name would have been to expose them as a the repulse of "Romish foes" from prey to the pious kidnappers, to whom the law afforded abroad, and that of the expulsion of "Ro. every facility for taking a child out of the control of mish traitors" at home. At none, however, of the Armada and "Glorious Revolution celebrations has it been noticed that 1888, besides being a Protestant bi- and tri-centenary, is also (if we may coin a word) a uni-centenary. And yet the date stands as an important one in the annals of the Reformed Church of France.

Huguenot parents.

† Some English books of the time, and also the "Conversations-Lexikon" of Brockhaus (Leipzig, and combined its practice on week-days with preaching 1878), state that Rabaut Saint-Etienne went to the bar, on Sundays. But for this, the present writer has found no French authority, save an entry in one of the contemporary lists of deputies to the States-General: "Rabaud de S. Etienne, ex-Ecclesiastique, Avocat en Parlement." Probably the title was never more than a

title. Rabaut himself tells us that in Switzerland every educated man called himself a pastor, and in France

January 29, 1788. "Edict of Tolera- either an avocat or an abbé.

>

of galley-slaves, but at last escapes to England. From thence the "spleen drives him back to France, where he meets Sophie Robinel, "pretty without regularity, lively, animated with all the fires of the Midi" a portrait perhaps of the author's own wife. We must deplore that, characteristic of the age, Ambroise, for all his pure religion, has but the morals of a Border ballad-hero, and that, though he insists on a Protestant marriage ceremony, he defers it a little late in the day. Catholic kinsfolk contest the marriage, and Ambroise, after losing a lawsuit, is again a fugitive, widowed, and with a child on his hands which, if it knew, might cry, "Inhuman country! wilt thou brand me from my birth?"

At the age of nineteen he returned to
France as a proposant (probationary min-
ister). On crossing the border he was
greeted with the news of the capture and
hanging of the pastor Rochette (1762), and
with a request that he would preach the
funeral sermon. If we knew Rabaut Saint-
Etienne's early life, says his friend Boissy
d'Anglas, we should find it as full of perils
and heroism as that of any Catholic priest
under the Terror; but the records which
have come down to us are of more peace-
ful days. For even now the tide was
turning. The "affaire Calas " (only a
month later than that of Rochette) enlisted
Voltaire's advocacy; and Voltaire ruled
every mind in France. By steps too many
to relate, the Protestants of France, like
the Roman Catholics of England, reached Rabaut's next work was of quite another
the stage of tacit toleration. Their wrongs, character, being a "Homage to the Mem-
exemplified in the "Honnête Criminel"
ory of the late Bishop of Nîmes ". Mon-
of Fenouillet de Falbaire's play (1767), seigneur de Bec de Lièvre who seems
drew tears from a court audience. Their to have been a worthy man, universally
meetings for worship in the stone-quarries charitable, and who had won Rabaut's an-
at Nîmes, where they sat under parasols, | tiquarian sympathies by his care for the
upon camp-stools, were winked at by the Maison-Carrée. "It is lawful," says the
military authorities; the petitions which writer, "to praise those when dead whom
they kept on sending to the local parlia- we would not have praised while living;
ments and to the governors of provinces, and we trust we are not among those vul-
were actually read, and men in high places gar souls who can see no merit in those
intimated that it was time to act upon who differ from them in opinion." The
them. Meanwhile Rabaut Saint-Etienne, tolerance and moderation of a Huguenot
rejoicing in the new turn things were tak- of that age (of which we could cite twenty
ing, made a love-match with a demoiselle examples) are the more to be admired
Boissière (1768), and developed into a when we consider what was still his legal
preacher of local fame, whose sermons on position illegitimated, excluded from
the marriage and coronation of Louis XVI. the professions, in strict law liable to death
were commended even by Catholics, and on the gallows.
whom our Duke of Gloucester (brother of
George III.), when passing through Lan-
guedoc, came in state to hear. Rabaut
drew up a petition for the Huguenot gal-
ley-slaves, and suggested to the synod to
present to the king a "remonstrance," and
to set up a Protestant newspaper. (Proj-
ects which were both rejected as being far
too audacious). In 1779 he broughttout
at London a tale called "Le Triomphe de
l'Intolérance," which, after various repub-
lications and renamings, finally appeared
about 1785 as "Le Vieux Cévénol, ou
Anecdotes de la Vie d'Ambroise Borély."
He had no need to strain his inventive
powers for incident. The sufferings he
described were all too real. In his fiction,
the hero's mother is turned out of doors
when on the point of childbirth. So in
real life was Madame Pechels, of Montau-
ban. The hero's uncle is drummed into
abjuration. So was Chambrun, the pastor
of Orange. The hero Ambroise himself
is dragooned, beggared, led in the chaine

Such was the state of things when Lafayette, fresh from America, and with his head full of liberty and equal justice, visited Nîmes, and introduced himself to the Rabaut household. "The hero of two worlds pressed in his arms the venerable Desert pastor," and urged the pastor's eldest son to come to Paris to plead the Protestant cause with the king's new ministers. Rabaut Saint-Etienne responded eagerly; his flock subscribed to pay for his journey

not without qualms as to the dangers of lettres de cachet and kidnappers on the road-and the Paris world gave a warm reception to the protégé of its hero. Counts and marquises were amazed to find in this "child of the Desert a civilized man with powdered hair and starched neckcloth, a classical scholar, a philosopher well-read in the works of the Encyclopædists, and of Gibbon and Bacon, and even an elegant poet who turned odes easily, and had on hand, it was whispered, an epic poem to the glory of Charles Martel. The cause

sume your place and your ascendant, for
you are the nation. You have been silent
because no one consulted_you; speak
while you may.'
"The Tiers-Etat at Nîmes
spoke effectually, by electing the author
as the first of its eight deputies to the

he advocated was enthusiastically es- | interests and your glory are at stake! poused. In the Assembly of Notables, Tiers-Etat, open not your books, regard Lafayette "openly expressed his generous not what your fathers have done, but resentiments." Ministers, Academicians, even a bishop, showed themselves welldisposed to the Protestants. In the autumn of 1787 (sic) an edict granting to "" non-Catholics the right to live in France and there exercise a profession or trade, to contract civil marriage, and to States-General. register their births and burials, was pro- It was a great triumph, seeing that most posed by Louis XVI., and, after some of the electors were nominal Catholics; opposition, was registered by the Paris but of these many were philosophers, and Parliament. "You will easily judge," ready to utilize Protestant zeal against wrote Lafayette to Washington, "with the dominant Church. We find nothing in what pleasure I presented, last Sunday, at Rabaut's political life to confirm the story a ministerial table, the first Protestant that he had vowed vengeance against the ecclesiastic who has been seen at Ver- clergy for its insults to him as a pastor; he sailles since the Revocation of 1685." The dislikes priests, but it is because they band Protestants, with joyful and grateful together with kings and nobles against hearts, flocked to ensure their legal status the people. Rabaut is Anglomaniac, and -in some cases, old men came to register still more Americomaniac; hater of war, the births of three generations, father, to which the light of reason is to put an child, and grandchild. Opponents of the end; he is as Voltairean as a Christian Revolution point triumphantly to the fact minister can well be; he finds "manly that toleration was granted to Protestants accents (not a very happy epithet) in by the king under the old régime, and that Rousseau, and one of his favorite writers he had promised to take the penal laws is that Abbé Raynal with whom our Dr. into consideration; and they urge that Johnson refused to shake hands, as being there is no knowing what further reforms an unbeliever. In the French Protestant, he might have made if his subjects would bred in the sober faith which had suchave left him free to make them. ceeded to Camisard fanaticism, we must Rabaut adorned his room with a portrait not look for the fervor of the English of Lafayette, inscribed in large gold let- Methodist. Rabaut has something in him ters" My Hero," and returned to Langue- of the political Dissenter, but much more doc (March, 1788) to preach a sermon on of his father's millenarianism secularized, "Render unto Cæsar," which was remem-leading him to put faith in Anarcharsis bered by hearers who were living in 1850. Clootz and his scheme of a universal naHe was now the greatest man in Nîmes, tion, and to look on the Revolution of his and that not only with his own flock. He day as akin to that which once replaced had made a name among the savants; his polytheism by Christianity. new book on primitive Greek history had been commended by the learned Bailly; and, what was of more general interest, he had added one to the twenty-five hundred and odd pamphlets on the coming StatesGeneral. From that day his clerical life was over and his political life began.

In his "Précis Historique de la Révolution," a work which has afforded the model for the letter of the Protestant deputy Chauvel in Erckmann-Chatrian's novel, Rabaut describes the reception of the deputies, and lets out some bitterness at being obliged to put on, "as if to play The best part of the Abbé Sieyes's in a comedy," the lawyer's dress, which famous pamphlet is its title, and that is he would so gladly have assumed in good not, of Sieyes's invention. Rabaut's is earnest at the outset of his career. He about as good as Sieyès's without the notices the two folding-doors opened for title; its doctrine is the same, that the the nobles and clergy, and but one for the Tiers-Etat is the real body of the nation, commons. "These babyisms, which senand the noblesse and clergy mere frac-sible men make light of, have their signifitions.* Frenchmen," it begins, "your cance." He counts up the cost of the new palaces, and reflects. "This magnificence is bought with the sweat of the people." He never names himself, but we

66

The sentence, “The Tiers-Etat is the Nation, minus the noblesse and clergy," which has been said to contain the whole gist of Sieyes's pamphlet, is in fact, not Sieyes's at all, but quoted by him from Rabaut, and quoted with censure as too mild. "Then some one might come after you and say, The noblesse is the Nation, minus the Tiers-Etat and clergy.' Why did

you not say at once that the Tiers-Etat is all?" But there is no doubt that Rabaut would have said so, only he was too prudent.

years men have vainly tried to do, namely, to reduce all men to one cult; you will not think that you possess a right of which your God Himself disdains to make use.

Rabaut was loudly cheered by the Phil

in the galleries. Liberty of worship was made a special clause in the declaration. The Protestants of Paris, who had hitherto met in a wine-merchant's parlor, now removed to the Church of St. Louis of the Louvre, and all the town marvelled to see heretics walk unmolested to their prêche, at a time, too, when non-juring priests ("papistes" par excellence in the language of the day), could not appear in the streets without danger of insult.

learn elsewhere that his was the first mo- |
tion, and the one finally adopted, for the
summons to the privileged orders, and
that he drew up the commission, and was
chosen first of the commissioners who
were to confer with those chosen by theosophical party, and by his co-religionists
clergy. If the republic began in the
States-General, Rabaut is its founder.
We pass over his account of the Tennis-
court oath one which might serve as
text to David's picture - his work on the
staff of the Moniteur, and his contribu-
tions to the Chronique de Paris. "M.
de Saint-Etienne," as he was now called,
continued to be courted in society, to-
gether with his wife, who is described as
a pretty woman, simple and amiable, and
with a soul sharing her husband's aspira-
tions. Mirabeau was but a Mi-Rabaut
(only worth half of Rabaut), said those
who distrusted the court as one merely
playing at democracy, and who saw in the
ex-pastor, whose grandfather had meas-
ured linen over the counter, a true repre-
sentative of the people.

Rabaut took part in the drawing-up of the Declaration of Rights, "our gospel which is persecuted because it is GOOD NEWS TO THE POOR, AND FOLLY ACCORDING TO THE WORLD;" and his great triumph is his speech of Sunday, August 23, 1789, on Liberty of Cult, which completed the work that the Toleration Edict had left half done.

This edict granted only civil rights to non-Catholics, and not that of assembling publicly for worship, which, as Rabaut ably contended, was an innate right of man, and one which "Christians, by their own principles, could not deny to Christians." Avoiding Voltaire's reproach that "Geneva would imitate Rome," he claimed, not sovereignty for the true believer, but equality for the Protestant, for the Jew, and for all non-Catholics, on the ground that "aristocracy of opinion, feudalism of thought," was incompatible with a free people.

In March, 1790, Rabaut was chosen president for one fortnight, as was the custom. "How this would astonish Louis XIV. !" he said when acknowledging the honor; and to his father he wrote, ever respectful, "The president of the National Assembly is at your feet." Alas! there is some doubt whether this election did not provoke the murder of four Nîmes Protestants; there is no doubt that agitators, whom we will not call clerical, by raising a cry that the nation had apostatized, got up a riot at Nîmes, and that for three days the streets ran with blood, while peacemaking priests, at the head of the National Guard, vainly strove to part the combatants. Catholics swore they had heard Rabaut whisper, "We have caught them at last!" when the spoliation of the clergy was decreed. They caricatured him, plane in hand (rabot, a play on his name), and with a serpent's tail peeping from beneath his Geneva gown, planing down the constitution; and in an anonymous squib, "The Secret Escaped, or M. Rabaut de Saint-Etienne's Dialogues with two English demoiselles," they repre sented "the honorable member," at an evening party, unfolding his plots for weakening the Church and embroiling it with the people. Farewell to the days, but a few short months ago, when priest and pastor, after christening each a child on their country's altar, would join in a hymn to Concord, and adjourn to the mayoress's to drink tea and praise the delicious Revolution.

I suppress, gentlemen, a crowd of facts which should endear to you two million sufferers; my country is free, and I would fain forget the ills which we have suffered with her. Gentlemen, you will not let it be said that you contradict your own principles, that you have declared one day that all men are In the Assembly the ex-pastor kept a equal, and another day that they are unequal. judicious silence on Church matters, but Generous Frenchmen! Let no one cite to in his "Précis " he gives us the views you those nations still intolerant which pro- of a Protestant philosophe. On current scribe your worship. You are made to give example, not to receive it. Europe, thirsting events he scarcely rises above the ordifor liberty, looks to you for lessons. You nary partisan of the Revolution; he takes are too wise, gentlemen, to fancy that it is the mythical "Day of Poniards quite reserved for you to do what for six hundred seriously, and gravely informs us that the