At last the order comes. Old Marquis de
Rochegude, having got letters from the courts
of Denmark, Sweden, and Prussia, had waylaid
Queen Anne in St. James's Park, and
moved her to appeal to the French government.
Out of three hundred, one hundred and
thirty-six are set free, and go by sea to Nice,
where Victor Amadeus receives them right
royally, and thence to Genoa, where, and
also at Berne, they are fed and lodged at the
public cost, and treated as the Greeks treated
conquering heroes. Thence to Amsterdam,
where all who choose to settle are pensioned
by the Dutch government. Marteilhe and
another visit England to beg Queen Anne
to intervene on behalf of those still in
captivity; but he goes back to Holland and
lives till 1777, just two years after the last
Protestant galley-slave is set free. From
family papers it would seem that he married,
and that his daughter married Vice-
Admiral Douglas, and that their son was about
Bergerac in 1785 "looking up" his Huguenot
relations. So, says M. Coquerel, it seems that
Marteilhe, forgotten in France, was respected
as he ought to be in England.

Jean Fabre, the other sufferer, whose memoirs
M. Coquerel gives us, became unexpectedly
famous. He was attending service near Nismes
in 1756, when an alarm was raised that the
soldiers were coming. He, light and active,
easily escapes, and comes back by-and-by among
the crowd to see what was going on. He finds
his father being marched off, and instantly
insists on taking his place. There is a long
struggle between father and son as to who
shall go ; at last, by the help of a kindly
sergeant, Jean gets his father off; and continues,
between prisons and galleys, more than
six years in captivity. Fortunately, he has
good friends, who, at last, after his health is
quite broken, make interest enough to get him
out. Jean Fabre's autobiography is not quite
so generally interesting as Marteilhe's. He
gives us a great deal more about himself, his
wishes, his plans, his early history— how he lost
money in the silk trade, how depressed he felt
in consequence, and so forth ; and much less
about things which are of general concern. His
style, too, is against him. He talks of the
Être suprème ; when his wife is supposed
to be in a dying state, " his principal food is
the torrents of tears which he sheds unceasingly.
" Altogether, a weaker man than Marteilhe,
and with an unpleasant whine throughout
his writings. Still he had a tender conscience.
When he put himself in his father's
place, it was, of course, necessary that he
should be free from the charge on which his
father was taken up ; so he says, " I was not at
meeting ;" and his letter to Paul Rabaut, his
pastor, confessing and begging forgiveness, is
one of the most touching things in the book.
Interest is made for him (as was said) with
the Duc de Choiseul, and he is not only
set free, but invited up to Paris, where one
Fenouillot de Falbaire has written a play about
him, called The Noble Convict, as if it was the
most wonderful thing in the world for a son to
sacrifice himself for his father. He is too ill to
go at once; but the play is acted, Duchess
de Villeroy interesting herself about it, and
planning a subscription for the poor fellow,
whose prospects have been ruined, and whose
cousin, having waited so long for him in spite
of her parents' wishes (a rare thing in France),
now finds she has a husband broken in health as
well as ruined in fortune. Unfortunately, St. Florentin,
a bitter persecutor of Huguenots, works
against the " subscription" plan, saying, in his
rough way, yet not without a spice of truth,
"They'll be getting up acts of heroism and
devotion every day, if they're to be paid for
them;" and Fabre gets nothing but a little
money which Princess Beauvau had collected
for him, and a piece of silk which she gave him
to make his wife a dress, along with a promise
from her husband that he would exert himself
to get him restored to his civic rights. By-
and-by he goes up to Paris. But the very next
day there is a change of ministry — a more
serious thing then than now — and his friend the
Duc de Choiseul is " disgraced." So, what with
regret at the money he had spent, and vexation
at not having gone up before, and fatigue with
running up and down Paris, he gets quite ill;
falls (as he calls it) " dans un anéantissement
universel" — a polite Gallicism for being kilt
intirely. All that Fabre adds to our knowledge
of the galley life is, that worse than the vermin
which devoured him, and the ruffians whom he
had to consort with, were the chaplains, who
worried him with their exhortations and played
the spy over his every action. There are
several other Nismes people in his galley.
One of them, a poor tailor — " an Israelite,
indeed,"says Fabre — is dying; he calls his
townsman to him to entrust him with a family
secret. Abbé Manau, whose theological
advances had been slighted, goes straight to the
commissary, and accuses Fabre of " preaching."
He is ordered never to go near his poor townsman
again. But the Jesuits won't let him alone.
A hairdresser's son of Nismes, sent to the
galleys for theft, is set on to accuse him of
trying to proselytise him. Fabre speaks up in
right violent style, and so enrages the chaplains
that they threaten to carry the case up to Paris
if the commissary does not punish him most
severely. The poor judge puts him off till next
day, and meanwhile the friends who stand by
him so well go before the "intendant," and
get the matter taken out of the commissary's
hands. " But for them," says Fabre, " I should
not be here to write this history."

The list of convicts, which takes up a large part
of Coquerel's volume, speaks for itself. Whole
families were swept off together. In February,
1746, for instance, the " intendant" of Auch
condemned twelve " gentlemen glass-workers" — a
father, his five sons, a grandson, his three sons-
in-law, his brother, and his nephew; and by the
same judgment one of his daughters was
sentenced to have her head shaved by the public
hangman, and to be shut up for life in a penitentiary,
"for having been godmother to a Protestant