Note Back to Main Text — Chapter IX

During all these years they toiled in their chains in a hell of foul and disgusting utterance, for they were mixed up with thieves and the worst of criminals. They ate the bread and drank the waters of bitterness. They seemed to be forsaken by the world. They had no one to love them, for most had left their families behind them at home, or perhaps in convents or prisons. They lived under the constant threats of their keepers, who lashed them to make them row harder, who lashed them to make them sit up, or lashed them to make them lie down. The Chevalier Langeron, captain of La Palme, of which Marteilhe was at first a rower, used to call the comite to him and say, "Go and refresh the backs of these Huguenots with a salad of strokes of the whip." For the captain, it seems, "held the most Jesuitical sentiments," and hated his Huguenot prisoners far worse than his thieves or his murderers.[49]