While we were at the castle last month, we visited a museum dedicated to the Huguenots, the French Protestants of the early 18th century who were persecuted for their beliefs. I was especially touched by the story of a woman named Marie.
Below is an excerpt from an article called "The Ultimate Meaning of True Womanhood" by John Piper (full article here, who tells her story.
The opposite of a wimpy woman is a girl named Marie Durant. In the late Seventeenth Century in . . . southern France, she was brought before the authorities, charged with the Huguenot heresy. She was fourteen years old, bright, attractive, marriageable. She was asked to abjure the Huguenot faith. She was not asked to commit an immoral act, to become a criminal, or even change the day-to-day quality of her behavior. She was only asked to say, “J’abjure.” No more, no less. She did not comply. Together with thirty other Huguenot women she was put into a tower by the sea. . . . For thirty-eight years she continued. . . . And instead of the hated word J’abjure she, together with her fellow martyrs, scratched on the wall of the prison tower the single word Resistez, resist! The word is still seen and gaped at by tourists on the stone wall at Aigues-Mortes. . . . We do not understand the terrifying simplicity of a religious commitment which asks nothing of time and gets nothing from time. We can understand a religion that enhances time. . . . But we cannot understand a faith which is not nourished by the temporal hope that tomorrow things will be better. To sit in a prison room with thirty others and to see the day change into night and summer into autumn, to feel the slow systemic changes within one’s flesh; the drying and wrinkling of the skin, the loss of muscle tone, the stiffening of the joints, the slow stupefaction of the senses - to feel all this and still persevere seems almost idiotic to a generation which has no capacity to wait and to endure.
A painting of Marie Durant and her fellow inmates at the tower of Aiges-Mortes.
The stone from the tower wall where the women etched "Resistez".
