Persecution is not easy to bear. To have all the powers and authorities employed against one's life, interests, and faith, is what few can persistently oppose. And torture, whether it be slow or sudden, is what many persons, by reason of their physical capacity, have not the power to resist. Even the slow torment of dragoons quartered in the houses of the heretics--their noise and shoutings, their drinking and roistering, the insults and outrages they were allowed to practise--was sufficient to compel many at once to declare themselves to be converted.
Indeed, pain is, of all things, one of the most terrible of converters. One of the prisoners condemned to the galleys, when he saw the tortures which the victims about him had to endure by night and by day, said that sufferings such as these were "enough to make one conform to Buddhism or Mahommedanism as well as to Popery"; and doubtless it was force and suffering which converted the Huguenots, far more than love of the King or love of the Pope.
By all these means--forcible, threatening, insulting, and bribing--employed for the conversion of the Huguenots, the Catholics boasted that in the space of three months they had received an accession of five hundred thousand new converts to the Church of Rome.
But the "new converts" did not gain much by their change. They were forced to attend mass, but remained suspected. Even the dragoons who converted them, called them dastards and deniers of their faith. They tried, if they could, to avoid confession, but confess they must. There was the fine, confiscation of goods, and imprisonment at the priest's back.
Places were set apart for them in the churches, where they were penned up like lepers. A person was stationed at the door with a roll of their names, to which they were obliged to answer. During the service, the most prominent among them were made to carry the lights, the holy water, the incense, and such things, which to Huguenots were an abomination. They were also required to partake of the Host, which Protestants regarded as an awful mockery of the glorious Godhead.
The Duc de Saint-Simon, in his memoirs, after referring to the unmanly cruelties practised by Louis XIV. on the Huguenots, "without the slightest pretext or necessity," characterizes this forced participation in the Eucharist as sacrilegious and blasphemous folly, notwithstanding that nearly all the bishops lent themselves to the practice. "From simulated abjuration," he says, "they [the Huguenots] are dragged to endorse what they do not believe in, and to receive the divine body of the Saint of saints whilst remaining persuaded that they are only eating bread which they ought to abhor. Such is the general abomination born of flattery and cruelty. From torture to abjuration, and from that to the communion, there were only twenty-four hours' distance; and the executioners were the conductors of the converts, and their witnesses. Those who in the end appeared to have become reconciled, when more at leisure did not fail, by their flight or their behaviour, to contradict their pretended conversion."[15]