Protestant Exiles from France/Volume 2 - Book Third - Chapter 25 - Note
Note.
Among refugee literati, though not proved to have taken up his abode in Britain, the anonymous author of the following book may be recorded:— “A New Systeme of the Apocalypse, or Plain and Methodical Illustrations of the Visions in the Revelation of St. John. Written by a French minister in the year 1685, and finisht but two days before the Dragoons plunderd him of all except this Treatise. To which is added, this Author’s Defence of his Illustrations concerning the Non-effusion of the Vials, in answer to Mr Jurieu. Faithfully Englished. London, printed in the year 1688.”
Here I may quote a sentence regarding the Prophecies of Holy Scripture, contained in a letter from F. Abauzit to William Burnet, Governor of New York: “I have often been witness to the happy effects they have produced in the minds of sensible persons who, though once surrounded with all the felicities of their native soil, have in the indigence of a foreign refuge preserved great cheerfulness of soul. They acknowledged that they lived on the prophecies, so powerfully were hey supported by the soothing hope of a speedy re-establishment.” In his Discourse on the Apocalypse, he says: “The English find here the revolutions of Great Britain; the Lutherans, the troubles of Germany; and the French refugees, what happened to them in France. . . . . There is only the [Roman] Catholic Church which hath circumscribed it within the limits of the first three centuries, during which it maintains that everything was accomplished, as if it were afraid lest, descending lower, it should see Antichrist in the person of its Metropolitan.”
Firmin Abauzit was a refugee in Geneva (born at Usez, in Languedoc, 11th November 1679, died 20th March 1767). A brother died in London in 1717. Their father died in 1681. By the Edict of 12th July 1685 the children of a deceased Protestant father were to be removed from the charge of the widowed mother, and an Edict of January 1686 provided as to all children of Protestants, that at the age of five they were to be transferred to Romish tutelage. Madame Abauzit (whose maiden name was Ann De Ville) sent her children to Orange, thence to a village near Die. The elder brother was forcibly brought back to Usez, entered by the Romanists in the books of their college in that place; and it was ordered that he should be boarded with a Romanist householder. His mother carried him off; the boy was hunted from place to place among the mountains of the Cevennes; he was nearly captured in one house, but the besiegers allowed an ass with panniers to pass out, and in one of the panniers Firmin was hidden. At last he was safely lodged in Geneva, two years before his mother. As to the younger son, we are told that “he experienced the same persecutions.” Madame Abauzit suffered a rigorous imprisonment in the castle of Sommières. She fell into a slow fever; and the Bishop of Usez sternly refused the physician’s request for her release from her dungeon. “Here she would have ended her life (says a biographer), if a happy incident had not called the commander of the fort to Paris. His brother, who took his place, was as intelligent and humane as the other was ignorant and brutal; he was penetrated with the signal merit of his prisoner, and warmly interested himself in her fortune. You wish her to die here (so he told the bishop in a letter), but I will not be her executioner. He wrote to the court, and obtained her enlargement until her health should be reestablished. Madame Abauzit, after surmounting a thousand perils, arrived at Geneva, two years after her son.” She had a nephew, M. de Ville, whose only child was married to Monsieur de Lisle Roy of St. Quintin. William III. made handsome offers to Firmin Abauzit, through Michael le Vassor, for his settlement in England; but he preferred Geneva. — (See Abauzit’s Works, translated by Harwood, London, 1774.)