Guards were placed at the entrance of the towns, at river-ferries, in the ports, on the bridges, the highways, at every avenue leading to the frontiers, and thousands of peasants joined the troops posted from distance to distance, that they might earn the reward promised to those who stopped the fugitives. Everything failed. The emigrants purchased passports, which were sold to them by the very secretaries of the governors, or by the clerks of the ministers of state. They bought over the sentinels with money, giving as much as six thousand and even eight thousand livres as the price of escape. Some, more daring, fought their way across the frontiers, sword in hand. The majority marched at night, by remote and solitary paths, concealing themselves in caverns during the day. They had _itineraries_ prepared expressly for this kind of travelling. They went down precipices, or climbed mountain-heights, and assumed all sorts of disguises. Shepherds, pilgrims, soldiers, huntsmen, valets, merchants, mendicants: they were always fugitives. Many, to avoid suspicion, pretended to sell chaplets and rosaries. The eyewitness Bénoit has given us a minute account:—“Women of quality, even sixty and seventy years of age, who had, so to speak, never placed a foot upon the ground except to cross their apartments, or to stroll in an avenue, travelled a hundred leagues to some village, which had been indicated by a guide. Girls of fifteen, of every rank, exposed themselves to the same hazard. They drew wheelbarrows, they bore manure, panniers, and other burdens. They disfigured their faces with dyes, to embrown their complexion, with ointments or juices that blistered their skin, and gave them a wrinkled aspect. Women and girls were seen to counterfeit sickness, dumbness, and even insanity. Some went disguised as men; and some, too delicate and small to pass as grown men, donned the dress of lackeys, and followed on foot, through the mud, a guide on horseback, who assumed the character of a man of importance. Many of these females reached Rotterdam in their borrowed garments, and hastening to the foot of the pulpit, before they had time to assume a more decent garb, published their repentance of their compulsory signature.”[98] The sea facilitated the evasion of a host of the Reformed. They hid themselves in bales of merchandise, in casks, under heaps of charcoal. They huddled together in holes in the ship’s hold, and there were children who passed whole weeks in these insupportable hiding-places without uttering a cry that might betray them. Sometimes the peril of an open boat was hazarded without a mouthful of provisions, the preparation of which might have prevented the flight of the fugitives, who thus put to sea with only a little water or snow, with which mothers moistened the lips of their babes.