It was not the common people alone who had quietly remained faithful to the church. In the upper-class families in the provinces the mother, with her daughters, had generally remained Catholic, since the father, with the Frenchman's natural caution and distrust of free thought, almost invariably, whatever his private opinions might be, regarded religion as a beneficial restraint upon women. The ladies had always embroidered altar-cloths, patronised the priest, given him money for his poor parishioners, attended mass most regularly. Now the celebration of mass was forbidden. The industrious and phlegmatic French peasant, his wife, and his whole household had, until the Revolution came, been accustomed to look up to _Monsieur le curé_ as a species of earthly providence, been accustomed to salute him reverently when he passed, and to ask his advice; he had baptized the children, and from his hands they had received their first sacrament; he had united Jacques to Fanchette in holy matrimony; he had administered the last sacraments to the old mother. No one read in the peasant's house; no one cultivated literature, or philosophy, or music. Every impulse of the soul that rose above the plough-share and the clods which it flung up took the direction of the church. Poor as it might be, it was a festal hall in comparison with the cottar's hovel--and it was a holy place; they knelt in it. Now the church was closed. Any one who has seen the peasants of France or Italy pray, seen the touching devotion which shines from eyes as earnest and as clear as a dog's, can understand what it meant to such people that there was no longer to be mass or priest. And Sunday too! The peasant is opposed to every change the utility of which is not at once apparent to him. Sunday to be done away with! Had any one ever heard the like? Could such an idea have occurred to any one except these gentlemen in Paris? Sunday, which had been kept holy for more than a thousand years--possibly since the creation of the world! God Himself had rested on the seventh day; but now the week was to have ten days, and to be called _Décade_, a word which conveyed no meaning. Was God, too, to be done away with? Add to all this the effect upon the younger and as yet undepraved priests. Frayssinous, who, after the Restoration, became so famous as a Catholic vindicator of Christianity, tells how he himself and a friend, also a priest, continued to perform their sacred avocations during the Reign of Terror in spite of all the threats of banishment, and how, in order to prove and strengthen themselves, and familiarise themselves with the death which awaited them if they were discovered, they went in turn to watch the executions on the permanent scaffold of Rodez.