Note Back to Main Text — Chapter II
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The result of those measures was to make hypocrites rather than believers, and they took effect upon the weakest and least-principled persons. The strongest, most independent, and high-minded of the Huguenots, who would not be hypocrites, resolved passively to resist them, and if they could not be allowed to exercise freedom of conscience in their own country, they determined to seek it elsewhere. Hence the large increase in the emigration from all parts of France immediately after the Act of Revocation had been proclaimed.[11] All the roads leading to the frontier or the sea-coast streamed with fugitives. They went in various forms and guises—sometimes in bodies of armed men, at other times in solitary parties, travelling at night and sleeping in the woods by day. They went as beggars, travelling merchants, sellers of beads and chaplets, gipsies, soldiers, shepherds, women with their faces dyed and sometimes dressed in men's clothes, and in all manner of disguises.