She made a bargain with a Savoyard, an ironmonger, and had herself packed up in a load of iron rods, the ends of which showed.

It was carried to the custom-house, and the tradesman paid on the weight of the iron, which was weighed together with the woman, who was not unpacked until she was six leagues from the frontier." "For a long time," says M.Floquet, "there was talk in Normandy of the Count of Marance, who, in the middle of a severe winter, flying with thirty-nine others on board a fishing-smack, encountered a tempest, and remained a long time at sea without provisions, dying of hunger, he, the countess, and all the passengers, amongst whom were pregnant women, mothers with infants at the breast, without resources of any sort, reduced for lack of everything to a little melted snow, with which they moistened the parched lips of the dying babes." It were impossible to estimate precisely the number of emigrations; it was probably between three and four hundred thousand.
"To speak only of our own province," writes M.Floquet in his _Histoire du Parlement de Normandie,_ "about one hundred and eighty-four thousand religionists went away; more than twenty-six thousand habitations were deserted; in Rouen there were counted no more than sixty thousand men instead of the eighty thousand that were to be seen there a few years before.

Almost all trade was stopped there as well as in the rest of Normandy.

The little amount of manufacture that was possible rotted away on the spot for want of transport to foreign countries, whence vessels were no longer found to come.

Rouen, Darnetal, Elbeuf, Louviers, Caudebec, Le Havre, Pont-Audemer, Caen, St.Lo, Alencon, and Bayeux were falling into decay, the different branches of trade and industry which had but lately been seen flourishing there having perished through the emigration of the masters whom their skilled workmen followed in shoals." The Norman emigration had been very numerous, thanks to the extent of its coasts and to the habitual communication between Normandy, England, and Holland; Vauban, however, remained very far from the truth when he deplored, in 1688, "the desertion of one hundred thousand men, the withdrawal from the kingdom of sixty millions of livres, the enemy's fleets swelled by nine thousand sailors, the best in the kingdom, and the enemy's armies by six hundred officers and twelve thousand soldiers, who had seen service." It is a natural but a striking fact that the Reformers who left France and were received with open arms in Brandenburg, Holland, England, and Switzerland carried in their hearts a profound hatred for the king who drove them away from their country, and everywhere took service against him, whilst the Protestants who remained in France, bound to the soil by a thousand indissoluble ties, continued at the same time to be submissive and faithful.