mark of his foot behind him.  At Lyons, no great distance up the Rhone, Marguerite had helped to establish an organised Protestant community; and when in 1536 she herself had passed through Montpellier, to visit her brother at Valence, and Montmorency’s camp at Avignon, she took with her doubtless Protestant chaplains of her own, who spoke wise words—­it may be that she spoke wise words herself—­to the ardent and inquiring students of Montpellier.  Moreover, Rondelet and his disciples had been for years past in constant communication with the Protestant savants of Switzerland and Germany, among whom the knowledge of nature was progressing as it never had progressed before.  For—­it is a fact always to be remembered—­it was only in the free air of Protestant countries the natural sciences could grow and thrive.  They sprung up, indeed, in Italy after the restoration of Greek literature in the fifteenth century; but they withered there again only too soon under the blighting upas shade of superstition.  Transplanted to the free air of Switzerland, of Germany, of Britain, and of Montpellier, then half Protestant, they developed rapidly and surely, simply because the air was free; to be checked again in France by the return of superstition with despotism super-added, until the eve of the great French Revolution.

So Rondelet had been for some years Protestant.  He had hidden in his house for a long while a monk who had left his monastery.  He had himself written theological treatises:  but when his Bishop Pellicier was imprisoned on a charge of heresy, Rondelet burnt his manuscripts, and kept his opinions to himself.  Still he was a suspected heretic, at last seemingly a notorious one; for only the year before his death, going to visit patients at Perpignan, he was waylaid by the Spaniards, and had to get home through bypasses of the Pyrenees, to avoid being thrown into the Inquisition.

And those were times in which it was necessary for a man to be careful, unless he had made up his mind to be burned.  For more than thirty years of Rondelet’s life the burning had gone on in his neighbourhood; intermittently it is true:  the spasms of superstitious fury being succeeded, one may charitably hope, by pity and remorse:  but still the burnings had gone on.  The Benedictine monk of St. Maur, who writes the history of Languedoc, says, quite en passant, how some one was burnt at Toulouse in 1553, luckily only in effigy, for he had escaped to Geneva:  but he adds, “next year they burned several heretics,” it being not worth while to mention their names.  In 1556 they burned alive at Toulouse Jean Escalle, a poor Franciscan monk, who had found his order intolerable; while one Pierre de Lavaur, who dared preach Calvinism in the streets of Nismes, was hanged and burnt.  So had the score of judicial murders been increasing year by year, till it had to be, as all evil scores have to be in this world, paid off with interest, and paid off especially against the ignorant and fanatic