Protestants were even forbidden to hire out horses, and Protestant grooms were forbidden to give riding lessons. Protestant domestics were forbidden to hire themselves as servants, and Protestant mistresses were forbidden to hire them under heavy penalties. If they engaged Protestant servants, they were liable to be sent to the galleys for life. They were even prevented employing "new converts."
Artisans were forbidden to work without certificates that their religion was Catholic. Protestant apprenticeships were suppressed. Protestant washerwomen were excluded from their washing-places on the river. In fact, there was scarcely a degradation that could be invented, or an insult that could be perpetrated, that was not practised upon those poor Huguenots who refused to be of "the King's religion."
Even when Protestants were about to take refuge in death, their troubles were not over. The priests had the power of forcing their way into the dying man's house, where they presented themselves at his bedside, and offered him conversion and the viaticum. If the dying man refused these, he was liable to be seized after death, dragged from the house, pulled along the streets naked, and buried in a ditch, or thrown upon a dunghill.[10]
[Footnote 10: Such was, in fact, the end of a man so distinguished as M. Paul Chenevix, Councillor of the Court of Metz, who died in 1686, the year after the Revocation. Although of the age of eighty, and so illustrious for his learning, his dead body was dragged along the streets on a hurdle and thrown upon a dunghill. See "Huguenot Refugees and their Descendants," under the name _Chenevix_. The present Archbishop of Dublin is descended from his brother Philip Chenevix, who settled in England shortly after the Revocation.]
For several years before the Revocation, while the persecutions of the Huguenots had been increasing, many had realised their means, and fled abroad into Switzerland, Germany, Holland, and England. But after the Revocation, emigration from France was strictly forbidden, under penalty of confiscation of the whole goods and property of the emigrant. Any person found attempting to leave the country, was liable to the seizure of all that belonged to him, and to perpetual imprisonment at the galleys; one half the amount realised by the sale of the property being paid to the informers, who thus became the most active agents of the Government. The Act also ordered that all landed proprietors who had left France before the Revocation, should return within four months, under penalty of confiscation of all their property.