“Here we can speak without fear; there are no traitors or spies here,” said Chaudieu, looking at the two as yet unnamed men.  Then, turning an ardent face to Christophe, “Are you,” he said, “full of that devotion that should animate a martyr?  Are you ready to endure all for our sacred cause?  Do you fear the tortures applied to the Councillor du Bourg, to the king’s tailor,—­tortures which await the majority of us?”

“I shall confess the gospel,” replied Lecamus, simply, looking at the windows of his father’s back-shop.

The family lamp, standing on the table where his father was making up his books for the day, spoke to him, no doubt, of the joys of family and the peaceful existence which he now renounced.  The vision was rapid, but complete.  His mind took in, at a glance, the burgher quarter full of its own harmonies, where his happy childhood had been spent, where lived his promised bride, Babette Lallier, where all things promised him a sweet and full existence; he saw the past; he saw the future, and he sacrificed it, or, at any rate, he staked it all.  Such were the men of that day.

“We need ask no more,” said the impetuous sailor; “we know him for one of our saints.  If the Scotchman had not done the deed he would kill us that infamous Minard.”

“Yes,” said Lecamus, “my life belongs to the church; I shall give it with joy for the triumph of the Reformation, on which I have seriously reflected.  I know that what we do is for the happiness of the peoples.  In two words:  Popery drives to celibacy, the Reformation establishes the family.  It is time to rid France of her monks, to restore their lands to the Crown, who will, sooner or later, sell them to the burghers.  Let us learn to die for our children, and make our families some day free and prosperous.”

The face of the young enthusiast, that of Chaudieu, that of the sailor, that of the stranger seated in the bow, lighted by the last gleams of the twilight, formed a picture which ought the more to be described because the description contains in itself the whole history of the times—­if it is, indeed, true that to certain men it is given to sum up in their own persons the spirit of their age.

The religious reform undertaken by Luther in Germany, John Knox in Scotland, Calvin in France, took hold especially of those minds in the lower classes into which thought had penetrated.  The great lords sustained the movement only to serve interests that were foreign to the religious cause.  To these two classes were added adventurers, ruined noblemen, younger sons, to whom all troubles were equally acceptable.  But among the artisan and merchant classes the new faith was sincere and based on calculation.  The masses of the poorer people adhered at once to a religion which gave the ecclesiastical property to the State, and deprived the dignitaries of the Church of their enormous revenues.  Commerce everywhere reckoned up the profits of this religious operation, and devoted itself body, soul, and purse, to the cause.