Doubtful Origins There were no chains or balls of pitted lead. There were no shrieks from racks or wheels of torture. It was a long and narrow cell, without much air, without much light, damp, bare, its window barred. Bundles of drab belongings lay piled in the corners, with half a dozen mugs in brown clay and a few chipped bowls, sticky with the leavings of the last grey meal. Hard sleeping-benches lined the walls, spread with dirty blankets, and in the middle of the floor, wittily, defiantly, stood a gaming table served by a couple of rickety chairs. Next door, a bigger but equally bleak room for the indebted and the destitute, then a dreary sickroom, and one chilly little private cell, available to anyone in exchange for a silver coin. Below, there was "the cave," a dank cell like the first, and like the first, serving both men and women. And beside this, the dungeon, where the least fortunate coughed and sighed through the days and nights of lives with no more hope.

Thus the home of Sieur Constant d'Aubigné de Surimeau, only son of the famous Agrippa d'Aubigné, poet and Protestant warrior, friend of kings, angry, disinheriting father. With the fifty-year-old Constant in his grim confinement were his wife, Jeanne, aged twenty-four, their little boys, Constant, aged six, and Charles, just one year old, and a baby girl, newborn in the prison, in the sickroom perhaps, or in the little private cell, struggling to life on the narrow bed or on the rough floor. They named her Françoise. It might all have been very different. Constant had stood to inherit, in whole or in part, three substantial estates, in addition to the lucrative governorship of an important Protestant town in his native region of Poitou, in western France. All this would have come to him through the efforts of his father, whose constancy in faith, bravery in battle, and shrewdness in outwitting his in-laws had won him a premier place among France's Huguenot gentry. Agrippa d'Aubigné had made his name in the previous century, during France's "spectacularly un-Christian" wars of religion; he had been the close friend and comrade-in-arms of the Protestant Henri of Navarre, later King Henri IV, first Bourbon King of France. After more than fifty years of pitched battles and acts of savagery on both sides, the matter had been more or less resolved in 1594, when Henri agreed to accept Catholicism as the price of the French crown.

"Paris is worth a mass" was his legendary remark on this occasion; cynically setting aside his unpredictable wife into the bargain, he had then married the solid and solidly Catholic Marie de' Medici. Apart from his capture of the crown itself, the signal achievement of Henri's life was beyond doubt his promulgation of the Edict of Nantes, four years after his accession to the throne, in 1598. This famous Edict, at the time one of the most advanced pieces of legislation in Europe, guaranteed a limited toleration of Protestantism within predominantly Catholic France. Members of the Protestant RPR, the Religion Prétendue Réformée ("so-called reformed religion"), as hostile Catholics referred to it, were thenceforth permitted to train pastors, retain their temples (though not more than two in the same district), conduct services, get married, baptize their children and educate them, all within their own Huguenot § moreover, Protestant men could once again purchase civil service posts or commissions in the King's army, two vital methods of social and economic advancement. On the surface a peacemaking measure between two factions long at war, the Edict of Nantes contained a grain of revolutionary significance for France: it recognized that religious and political allegiance could be two separate things. After 1598, a Frenchman could officially be both a Protestant and a loyal servant of his Catholic King. Nonetheless, Henri's farsighted Edict was too soon, or perhaps too weakly enforced, to overcome the country's religious divide, and far from integrating the two communities, it finally dictated their formal separation. Most of France remained officially and exclusively Catholic.

The Huguenots were accorded 120 "places of safety," towns with an already Protestant majority, mostly in the south and west of the country, where their cult might be freely practised. And it was to one of these, his own staunch western province of Poitou, that the disgusted Agrippa d'Aubigné had retreated after the King's apostasy to the "stinking" Catholic Church. Here, over the next twelve years or so, he had raised three children (Marie, Louise, and Constant), buried his wife, fathered an illegitimate son (Nathan), and produced a series of poems and tracts of high literary merit, "my spiritual children," as he termed them. On the clever and spirited Constant, "my eldest and only son," Nathan notwithstanding, Agrippa lavished "the care and expense," as he said, "that might have been spent on the son of a prince." The boy was taught "by the best tutors in France, all enticed away from the best families by the doubling of their wages." Agrippa's efforts were to no avail. Constant proved an unwilling pupil and a most ungrateful son. By the age of twenty he was squandering his talent and his property in the time-honoured ways.

"This wretch," wrote his father, "first abandoned his books, then took to gaming and drinking, and then managed to undo himself completely in the stews of Holland." Returning to France, Constant had compounded his reputation, first by marrying without his father's consent, and then by killing a man in a duel; the latter, however, an affaire d'honneur, occasioned him no penalty. It was only in 1613, when he abducted a girl admired by one of his friends, that Constant was arrested and, at the age of twenty-eight, condemned to death. He escaped execution by agreeing to enlist in the army, a Protestant army then in rebellion against the Queen Mother, Marie de' Medici. King Henri IV, royal friend of Agrippa's youth, had been assassinated in 1610, and his widow Marie was now Regent of France on behalf of her son, the twelve-year-old Louis XIII. On Henri's death, his widow had at first confirmed his great religious Edict, but in the ensuing three years, guided from afar by the Pope and from closer at hand by her own court favourites, the malleable Marie had begun a general suppression of Protestantism within the country. In practice, the terms of the Edict had never been fully observed, but now the protective walls of the Protestant "safe places" were crumbling, and the soldiers deputed to guard them were well in arrears of pay. Huguenots on their deathbeds were being accosted by Catholic priests threatening hellfire, funerals were being disrupted, and Huguenots going innocently about their business were being harassed in a thousand petty acts, in direct violation of the Edict.

More important than all the daily frictions of Catholic-Protestant life, however, was the Queen Mother's increasingly apparent enthusiasm for the cause of the Spanish Habsburgs, which loyal Frenchmen of both confessions eyed with distaste and anxiety. The Habsburgs in general, and the Spanish in particular, were among France's bitterest enemies. It was their fanatical King, Felipe II, the "stately Catholic," who had kept the fires of France's internal religious wars stoked for decades, providing "Indian gold"-money from his mines in South America-to Catholic extremists in France. Fears of outright war between France and Spain had remained alive right until Henri's death. Naïve politically, his widow, Marie, had failed to grasp that the death of her powerful husband had greatly weakened the country's standing; France was no longer viewed in Europe as a steady bulwark against Spanish Habsburg influence. A Habsburg herself on her mother's side, Marie was even seeking to forge an alliance with the Spaniards by a double royal marriage: her daughter Elisabeth was to marry the Prince of Asturias, heir to the Spanish imperial throne, and even more alarmingly, her son, France's boy-King Louis XIII, was to marry the Spanish King's daughter. In these two impending marriages, Marie saw a double celebration of alliance between two equal powers, while the Spaniards, and many Frenchmen, too, saw instead the doubly sure Spanish capture of a weakened but still useful dominion, and its certain continuance thereafter in the Catholic religion. In 1613, just in time to ensure Constant d'Aubigné's reprieve from execution, the boy-King's cousin, the prince de Bourbon-Condé, decided to oust Marie and capture the Regency for himself.

He set himself at the head of an army manned by anxious Huguenots concerned for their fate if France should fall under the control of fiercely Catholic Spain. Condé himself was Protestant less by conviction than by political convenience, but he was Frenchman enough and nobleman enough to resent the power of the German-Italian Marie de' Medici, sprung from a despised branch of parvenu merchant bankers and manipulated by her papist puppet masters in Madrid-which provided a good excuse, at least, for an ambitious and greedy prince more than ready to capitalize on the genuine fears of his Protestant compatriots. It was in Condé's army of Huguenots that Constant now enlisted, apparently following arrangements made by his father. After desultory warfare of three years or so, during which both royal marriages defiantly took place, peace was finally concluded in 1616. The peace brought freedom for Con.