In his book, Passion, Karl Olsson tells a story of incredible
patience among the early French Protestants called Huguenots. In
the late Seventeenth Century in… southern France, a girl named
Marie Durant was brought before the authorities, charged with
the Huguenot heresy. She was fourteen years old, bright,
attractive, marriageable. She was asked to abjure the Huguenot
faith. She was not asked to commit an immoral act, to become a
criminal, or even to change the day-to-day quality of her
behavior. She was only asked to say, “J’abjure.” No more, no
less. She did not comply. Together with thirty other Huguenot
women she was put into a tower by the sea…. For thirty-eight
years she continued…. And instead of the hated word J’abjure
she, together with her fellow martyrs, scratched on the wall of
the prison tower the single word Resistez, resist! The word is
still seen and gaped at by tourists on the stone wall at Aigues-
Mortes…. We do not understand the terrifying simplicity of a
religious commitment which asks no