Catherine De Medici

XIII

CALVIN

Two hours later all was ready, and the ardent minister was on his way to Switzerland, accompanied by a nobleman in the service of the king of Navarre (of whom Chaudieu pretended to be the secretary), carrying with him despatches from the Reformers in the Dauphine.  This sudden departure was chiefly in the interests of Catherine de’ Medici, who, in order to gain time to establish her power, had made a bold proposition to the Reformers which was kept a profound secret.  This strange proceeding explains the understanding so suddenly apparent between herself and the leaders of the Reform.  The wily woman gave, as a pledge of her good faith, an intimation of her desire to heal all differences between the two churches by calling an assembly, which should be neither a council, nor a conclave, nor a synod, but should be known by some new and distinctive name, if Calvin consented to the project.  When this secret was afterwards divulged (be it remarked in passing) it led to an alliance between the Duc de Guise and the Connetable de Montmorency against Catherine and the king of Navarre, —­a strange alliance! known in history as the Triumvirate, the Marechal de Saint-Andre being the third personage in the purely Catholic coalition to which this singular proposition for a “colloquy” gave rise.  The secret of Catherine’s wily policy was rightly understood by the Guises; they felt certain that the queen cared nothing for this mysterious assembly, and was only temporizing with her new allies in order to secure a period of peace until the majority of Charles IX.; but none the less did they deceive the Connetable into fearing a collusion of real interests between the queen and the Bourbons, —­whereas, in reality, Catherine was playing them all one against another.

The queen had become, as the reader will perceive, extremely powerful in a very short time.  The spirit of discussion and controversy which now sprang up was singularly favorable to her position.  The Catholics and the Reformers were equally pleased to exhibit their brilliancy one after another in this tournament of words; for that is what it actually was, and no more.  It is extraordinary that historians have mistaken one of the wiliest schemes of the great queen for uncertainty and hesitation!  Catherine never went more directly to her own ends than in just such schemes which appeared to thwart them.  The king of Navarre, quite incapable of understanding her motives, fell into her plan in all sincerity, and despatched Chaudieu to Calvin, as we have seen.  The minister had risked his life to be secretly in Orleans and watch events; for he was, while there, in hourly peril of being discovered and hung as a man under sentence of banishment.

According to the then fashion of travelling, Chaudieu could not reach Geneva before the month of February, and the negotiations were not likely to be concluded before the end of March; consequently the assembly could certainly not take place before the month of May, 1561.  Catherine, meantime, intended to amuse the court and the various conflicting interests by the coronation of the king, and the ceremonies of his first “lit de justice,” at which l’Hopital and de Thou recorded the letters-patent by which Charles IX. confided the administration to his mother in common with the present lieutenant-general of the kingdom, Antoine de Navarre, the weakest prince of those days.

Is it not a strange spectacle this of the great kingdom of France waiting in suspense for the “yes” or “no” of a French burgher, hitherto an obscure man, living for many years past in Geneva?  The transalpine pope held in check by the pontiff of Geneva!  The two Lorrain princes, lately all-powerful, now paralyzed by the momentary coalition of the queen-mother and the first prince of the blood with Calvin!  Is not this, I say, one of the most instructive lessons ever given to kings by history,—­a lesson which should teach them to study men, to seek out genius, and employ it, as did Louis XIV., wherever God has placed it?

Calvin, whose name was not Calvin but Cauvin, was the son of a cooper at Noyon in Picardy.  The region of his birth explains in some degree the obstinacy combined with capricious eagerness which distinguished this arbiter of the destinies of France in the sixteenth century.  Nothing is less known than the nature of this man, who gave birth to Geneva and to the spirit that emanated from that city.  Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who had very little historical knowledge, has completely ignored the influence of Calvin on his republic.  At first the embryo Reformer, who lived in one of the humblest houses in the upper town, near the church of Saint-Pierre, over a carpenter’s shop (first resemblance between him and Robespierre), had no great authority in Geneva.  In fact for a long time his power was malevolently checked by the Genevese.  The town was the residence in those days of a citizen whose fame, like that of several others, remained unknown to the world at large and for a time to Geneva itself.  This man, Farel, about the year 1537, detained Calvin in Geneva, pointing out to him that the place could be made the safe centre of a reformation more active and thorough than that of Luther.  Farel and Calvin regarded Lutheranism as an incomplete work,—­insufficient in itself and without any real grip upon France.  Geneva, midway between France and Italy, and speaking the French language, was admirably situated for ready communication with Germany, France, and Italy.  Calvin thereupon adopted Geneva as the site of his moral fortunes; he made it thenceforth the citadel of his ideas.

The Council of Geneva, at Farel’s entreaty, authorized Calvin in September, 1538, to give lectures on theology.  Calvin left the duties of the ministry to Farel, his first disciple, and gave himself up patiently to the work of teaching his doctrine.  His authority, which became so absolute in the last years of his life, was obtained with difficulty and very slowly.  The great agitator met with such serious obstacles that he was banished for a time from Geneva on account of the severity of his reform.  A party of honest citizens still clung to their old luxury and their old customs.  But, as usually happens, these good people, fearing ridicule, would not admit the real object of their efforts, and kept up their warfare against the new doctrines on points altogether foreign to the real question.  Calvin insisted that leavened bread should be used for the communion, and that all feasts should be abolished except Sundays.  These innovations were disapproved of at Berne and at Lausanne.  Notice was served on the Genevese to conform to the ritual of Switzerland.  Calvin and Farel resisted; their political opponents used this disobedience to drive them from Geneva, whence they were, in fact, banished for several years.  Later Calvin returned triumphantly at the demand of his flock.  Such persecutions always become in the end the consecration of a moral power; and, in this case, Calvin’s return was the beginning of his era as prophet.  He then organized his religious Terror, and the executions began.  On his reappearance in the city he was admitted into the ranks of the Genevese burghers; but even then, after fourteen years’ residence, he was not made a member of the Council.  At the time of which we write, when Catherine sent her envoy to him, this king of ideas had no other title than that of “pastor of the Church of Geneva.”  Moreover, Calvin never in his life received a salary of more than one hundred and fifty francs in money yearly, fifteen hundred-weight of wheat, and two barrels of wine.  His brother, a tailor, kept a shop close to the place Saint-Pierre, in a street now occupied by one of the large printing establishments of Geneva.  Such personal disinterestedness, which was lacking in Voltaire, Newton, and Bacon, but eminent in the lives of Rabelais, Spinosa, Loyola, Kant, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is indeed a magnificent frame to those ardent and sublime figures.

The career of Robespierre can alone picture to the minds of the present day that of Calvin, who, founding his power on the same bases, was as despotic and as cruel as the lawyer of Arras.  It is a noticeable fact that Picardy (Arras and Noyon) furnished both these instruments of reformation!  Persons who wish to study the motives of the executions ordered by Calvin will find, all relations considered, another 1793 in Geneva.  Calvin cut off the head of Jacques Gruet “for having written impious letters, libertine verses, and for working to overthrow ecclesiastical ordinances.”  Reflect upon that sentence, and ask yourselves if the worst tyrants in their saturnalias ever gave more horribly burlesque reasons for their cruelties.  Valentin Gentilis, condemned to death for “involuntary heresy,” escaped execution only by making a submission far more ignominious than was ever imposed by the Catholic Church.  Seven years before the conference which was now to take place in Calvin’s house on the proposals of the queen-mother, Michel Servet, a Frenchman, travelling through Switzerland, was arrested at Geneva, tried, condemned, and burned alive, on Calvin’s accusation, for having “attacked the mystery of the Trinity,” in a book which was neither written nor published in Geneva.  Remember the eloquent remonstrance of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose book, overthrowing the Catholic religion, written in France and published in Holland, was burned by the hangman, while the author, a foreigner, was merely banished from the kingdom where he had endeavored to destroy the fundamental proofs of religion and of authority.  Compare the conduct of our Parliament with that of the Genevese tyrant.  Again:  Bolsee was brought to trial for “having other ideas than those of Calvin on predestination.”  Consider these things, and ask yourselves if Fourquier-Tinville did worse.  The savage religious intolerance of Calvin was, morally speaking, more implacable than the savage political intolerance of Robespierre.  On a larger stage than that of Geneva, Calvin would have shed more blood than did the terrible apostle of political equality as opposed to Catholic equality.  Three centuries earlier a monk of Picardy drove the whole West upon the East.  Peter the Hermit, Calvin, and Robespierre, each at an interval of three hundred years and all three from the same region, were, politically speaking, the Archimedean screws of their age,—­at each epoch a Thought which found its fulcrum in the self-interest of mankind.

Calvin was undoubtedly the maker of that melancholy town called Geneva, where, only ten years ago, a man said, pointing to a porte-cochere in the upper town, the first ever built there:  “By that door luxury has invaded Geneva.”  Calvin gave birth, by the sternness of his doctrines and his executions, to that form of hypocritical sentiment called “cant.”[] According to those who practice it, good morals consist in renouncing the arts and the charms of life, in eating richly but without luxury, in silently amassing money without enjoying it otherwise than as Calvin enjoyed power—­by thought.  Calvin imposed on all the citizens of his adopted town the same gloomy pall which he spread over his own life.  He created in the Consistory a Calvinistic inquisition, absolutely similar to the revolutionary tribunal of Robespierre.  The Consistory denounced the persons to be condemned to the Council, and Calvin ruled the Council through the Consistory, just as Robespierre ruled the Convention through the Club of the Jacobins.  In this way an eminent magistrate of Geneva was condemned to two months’ imprisonment, the loss of all his offices, and the right of ever obtaining others “because he led a disorderly life and was intimate with Calvin’s enemies.”  Calvin thus became a legislator.  He created the austere, sober, commonplace, and hideously sad, but irreproachable manners and customs which characterize Geneva to the present day,—­customs preceding those of England called Puritanism, which were due to the Cameronians, disciples of Cameron (a Frenchman deriving his doctrine from Calvin), whom Sir Walter Scott depicts so admirably.  The poverty of a man, a sovereign master, who negotiated, power to power, with kings, demanding armies and subsidies, and plunging both hands into their savings laid aside for the unfortunate, proves that thought, used solely as a means of domination, gives birth to political misers,—­men who enjoy by their brains only, and, like the Jesuits, want power for power’s sake.  Pitt, Luther, Calvin, Robespierre, all those Harpagons of power, died without a penny.  The inventory taken in Calvin’s house after his death, which comprised all his property, even his books, amounted in value, as history records, to two hundred and fifty francs.  That of Luther came to about the same sum; his widow, the famous Catherine de Bora, was forced to petition for a pension of five hundred francs, which as granted to her by an Elector of Germany.  Potemkin, Richelieu, Mazarin, those men of thought and action, all three of whom made or laid the foundation of empires, each left over three hundred millions behind them.  They had hearts; they loved women and the arts; they built, they conquered; whereas with the exception of the wife of Luther, the Helen of that Iliad, all the others had no tenderness, no beating of the heart for any woman with which to reproach themselves.

[] Momerie.

This brief digression was necessary in order to explain Calvin’s position in Geneva.

During the first days of the month of February in the year 1561, on a soft, warm evening such as we may sometimes find at that season on Lake Leman, two horsemen arrived at the Pre-l’Eveque,—­thus called because it was the former country-place of the Bishop of Geneva, driven from Switzerland about thirty years earlier.  These horsemen, who no doubt knew the laws of Geneva about the closing of the gates (then a necessity and now very ridiculous) rode in the direction of the Porte de Rive; but they stopped their horses suddenly on catching sight of a man, about fifty years of age, leaning on the arm of a servant-woman, and walking slowly toward the town.  This man, who was rather stout, walked with difficulty, putting one foot after the other with pain apparently, for he wore round shoes of black velvet, laced in front.

“It is he!” said Chaudieu to the other horseman, who immediately dismounted, threw the reins to his companion, and went forward, opening wide his arms to the man on foot.

The man, who was Jean Calvin, drew back to avoid the embrace, casting a stern look at his disciple.  At fifty years of age Calvin looked as though he were sixty.  Stout and stocky in figure, he seemed shorter still because the horrible sufferings of stone in the bladder obliged him to bend almost double as he walked.  These pains were complicated by attacks of gout of the worst kind.  Every one trembled before that face, almost as broad as it was long, on which, in spite of its roundness, there was as little human-kindness as on that of Henry the Eighth, whom Calvin greatly resembled.  Sufferings which gave him no respite were manifest in the deep-cut lines starting from each side of the nose and following the curve of the moustache till they were lost in the thick gray beard.  This face, though red and inflamed like that of a heavy drinker, showed spots where the skin was yellow.  In spite of the velvet cap, which covered the huge square head, a vast forehead of noble shape could be seen and admired; beneath it shone two dark eyes, which must have flashed forth flame in moments of anger.  Whether by reason of his obesity, or because of his thick, short neck, or in consequence of his vigils and his constant labors, Calvin’s head was sunk between his broad shoulders, which obliged him to wear a fluted ruff of very small dimensions, on which his face seemed to lie like the head of John the Baptist on a charger.  Between his moustache and his beard could be seen, like a rose, his small and fresh and eloquent little mouth, shaped in perfection.  The face was divided by a square nose, remarkable for the flexibility of its entire length, the tip of which was significantly flat, seeming the more in harmony with the prodigious power expressed by the form of that imperial head.  Though it might have been difficult to discover on his features any trace of the weekly headaches which tormented Calvin in the intervals of the slow fever that consumed him, suffering, ceaselessly resisted by study and by will, gave to that mask, superficially so florid, a certain something that was terrible.  Perhaps this impression was explainable by the color of a sort of greasy layer on the skin, due to the sedentary habits of the toiler, showing evidence of the perpetual struggle which went on between that valetudinarian temperament and one of the strongest wills ever known in the history of the human mind.  The mouth, though charming, had an expression of cruelty.  Chastity, necessitated by vast designs, exacted by so many sickly conditions, was written upon that face.  Regrets were there, notwithstanding the serenity of that all-powerful brow, together with pain in the glance of those eyes, the calmness of which was terrifying.

Calvin’s costume brought into full relief this powerful head.  He wore the well-known cassock of black cloth, fastened round his waist by a black cloth belt with a brass buckle, which became thenceforth the distinctive dress of all Calvinist ministers, and was so uninteresting to the eye that it forced the spectator’s attention upon the wearer’s face.

“I suffer too much, Theodore, to embrace you,” said Calvin to the elegant cavalier.

Theodore de Beze, then forty-two years of age and lately admitted, at Calvin’s request, as a Genevese burgher, formed a violent contrast to the terrible pastor whom he had chosen as his sovereign guide and ruler.  Calvin, like all burghers raised to moral sovereignty, and all inventors of social systems, was eaten up with jealousy.  He abhorred his disciples; he wanted no equals; he could not bear the slightest contradiction.  Yet there was between him and this graceful cavalier so marked a difference, Theodore de Beze was gifted with so charming a personality enhanced by a politeness trained by court life, and Calvin felt him to be so unlike his other surly janissaries, that the stern reformer departed in de Beze’s case from his usual habits.  He never loved him, for this harsh legislator totally ignored all friendship, but, not fearing him in the light of a successor, he liked to play with Theodore as Richelieu played with his cat; he found him supple and agile.  Seeing how admirably de Beze succeeded in all his missions, he took a fancy to the polished instrument of which he knew himself the mainspring and the manipulator; so true is it that the sternest of men cannot do without some semblance of affection.  Theodore was Calvin’s spoilt child; the harsh reformer never scolded him; he forgave him his dissipations, his amours, his fine clothes and his elegance of language.  Perhaps Calvin was not unwilling to show that the Reformation had a few men of the world to compare with the men of the court.  Theodore de Beze was anxious to introduce a taste for the arts, for literature, and for poesy into Geneva, and Calvin listened to his plans without knitting his thick gray eyebrows.  Thus the contrast of character and person between these two celebrated men was as complete and marked as the difference in their minds.

Calvin acknowledged Chaudieu’s very humble salutation by a slight inclination of the head.  Chaudieu slipped the bridles of both horses through his arms and followed the two great men of the Reformation, walking to the left, behind de Beze, who was on Calvin’s right.  The servant-woman hastened on in advance to prevent the closing of the Porte de Rive, by informing the captain of the guard that Calvin had been seized with sudden acute pains.

Theodore de Beze was a native of the canton of Vezelay, which was the first to enter the Confederation, the curious history of which transaction has been written by one of the Thierrys.  The burgher spirit of resistance, endemic at Vezelay, no doubt, played its part in the person of this man, in the great revolt of the Reformers; for de Beze was undoubtedly one of the most singular personalities of the Heresy.

“You suffer still?” said Theodore to Calvin.

“A Catholic would say, ‘like a lost soul,’” replied the Reformer, with the bitterness he gave to his slightest remarks.  “Ah!  I shall not be here long, my son.  What will become of you without me?”

“We shall fight by the light of your books,” said Chaudieu.

Calvin smiled; his red face changed to a pleased expression, and he looked favorably at Chaudieu.

“Well, have you brought me news?  Have they massacred many of our people?” he said smiling, and letting a sarcastic joy shine in his brown eyes.

“No,” said Chaudieu, “all is peaceful.”

“So much the worse,” cried Calvin; “so much the worse!  All pacification is an evil, if indeed it is not a trap.  Our strength lies in persecution.  Where should we be if the Church accepted Reform?”

“But,” said Theodore, “that is precisely what the queen-mother appears to wish.”

“She is capable of it,” remarked Calvin.  “I study that woman—­”

“What, at this distance?” cried Chaudieu.

“Is there any distance for the mind?” replied Calvin, sternly, for he thought the interruption irreverent.  “Catherine seeks power, and women with that in their eye have neither honor nor faith.  But what is she doing now?”

“I bring you a proposal from her to call a species of council,” replied Theodore de Beze.

“Near Paris?” asked Calvin, hastily.

“Yes.”

“Ha! so much the better!” exclaimed the Reformer.

“We are to try to understand each other and draw up some public agreement which shall unite the two churches.”

“Ah! if she would only have the courage to separate the French Church from the court of Rome, and create a patriarch for France as they did in the Greek Church!” cried Calvin, his eyes glistening at the idea thus presented to his mind of a possible throne.  “But, my son, can the niece of a Pope be sincere?  She is only trying to gain time.”

“She has sent away the Queen of Scots,” said Chaudieu.

“One less!” remarked Calvin, as they passed through the Porte de Rive.  “Elizabeth of England will restrain that one for us.  Two neighboring queens will soon be at war with each other.  One is handsome, the other ugly,—­a first cause for irritation; besides, there’s the question of illegitimacy—­”

He rubbed his hands, and the character of his joy was so evidently ferocious that de Beze shuddered:  he saw the sea of blood his master was contemplating.

“The Guises have irritated the house of Bourbon,” said Theodore after a pause.  “They came to an open rupture at Orleans.”

“Ah!” said Calvin, “you would not believe me, my son, when I told you the last time you started for Nerac that we should end by stirring up war to the death between the two branches of the house of France?  I have, at least, one court, one king and royal family on my side.  My doctrine is producing its effect upon the masses.  The burghers, too, understand me; they regard as idolators all who go to Mass, who paint the walls of their churches, and put pictures and statues within them.  Ha! it is far more easy for a people to demolish churches and palaces than to argue the question of justification by faith, or the real presence.  Luther was an argufier, but I,—­I am an army!  He was a reasoner, I am a system.  In short, my sons, he was merely a skirmisher, but I am Tarquin!  Yes, my faithful shall destroy pictures and pull down churches; they shall make mill-stones of statues to grind the flour of the peoples.  There are guilds and corporations in the States-general—­I will have nothing there but individuals.  Corporations resist; they see clear where the masses are blind.  We must join to our doctrine political interests which will consolidate it, and keep together the materiel of my armies.  I have satisfied the logic of cautious souls and the minds of thinkers by this bared and naked worship which carries religion into the world of ideas; I have made the peoples understand the advantages of suppressing ceremony.  It is for you, Theodore, to enlist their interests; hold to that; go not beyond it.  All is said in the way of doctrine; let no one add one iota.  Why does Cameron, that little Gascon pastor, presume to write of it?”

Calvin, de Beze, and Chaudieu were mounting the steep steps of the upper town in the midst of a crowd, but the crowd paid not the slightest attention to the men who were unchaining the mobs of other cities and preparing them to ravage France.

After this terrible tirade, the three marched on in silence till they entered the little place Saint-Pierre and turned toward the pastor’s house.  On the second story of that house (never noted, and of which in these days no one is ever told in Geneva, where, it may be remarked, Calvin has no statue) his lodging consisted of three chambers with common pine floors and wainscots, at the end of which were the kitchen and the bedroom of his woman-servant.  The entrance, as usually happened in most of the burgher households of Geneva, was through the kitchen, which opened into a little room with two windows, serving as parlor, salon, and dining-room.  Calvin’s study, where his thought had wrestled with suffering for the last fourteen years, came next, with the bedroom beyond it.  Four oaken chairs covered with tapestry and placed around a square table were the sole furniture of the parlor.  A stove of white porcelain, standing in one corner of the room, cast out a gentle heat.  Panels and a wainscot of pine wood left in its natural state without decoration covered the walls.  Thus the nakedness of the place was in keeping with the sober and simple life of the Reformer.

“Well?” said de Beze as they entered, profiting by a few moments when Chaudieu left them to put up the horse at a neighboring inn, “what am I to do?  Will you agree to the colloquy?”

“Of course,” replied Calvin.  “And it is you, my son, who will fight for us there.  Be peremptory, be arbitrary.  No one, neither the queen nor the Guises nor I, wants a pacification; it would not suit us at all.  I have confidence in Duplessis-Mornay; let him play the leading part.  Are we alone?” he added, with a glance of distrust into the kitchen, where two shirts and a few collars were stretched on a line to dry.  “Go and shut all the doors.  Well,” he continued when Theodore had returned, “we must drive the king of Navarre to join the Guises and the Connetable by advising him to break with Queen Catherine de’ Medici.  Let us all get the benefit of that poor creature’s weakness.  If he turns against the Italian she will, when she sees herself deprived of that support, necessarily unite with the Prince de Conde and Coligny.  Perhaps this manoeuvre will so compromise her that she will be forced to remain on our side.”

Theodore de Beze caught the hem of Calvin’s cassock and kissed it.

“Oh! my master,” he exclaimed, “how great you are!”

“Unfortunately, my dear Theodore, I am dying.  If I die without seeing you again,” he added, sinking his voice and speaking in the ear of his minister of foreign affairs, “remember to strike a great blow by the hand of some one of our martyrs.”

“Another Minard to be killed?”

“Something better than a mere lawyer.”

“A king?”

“Still better!—­a man who wants to be a king.”

“The Duc de Guise!” exclaimed Theodore, with an involuntary gesture.

“Well?” cried Calvin, who thought he saw disappointment or resistance in the gesture, and did not see at the same moment the entrance of Chaudieu.  “Have we not the right to strike as we are struck?—­yes, to strike in silence and in darkness.  May we not return them wound for wound, and death for death?  Would the Catholics hesitate to lay traps for us and massacre us?  Assuredly not.  Let us burn their churches!  Forward, my children!  And if you have devoted youths—­”

“I have,” said Chaudieu.

“Use them as engines of war! our cause justifies all means.  Le Balafre, that horrible soldier, is, like me, more than a man; he is a dynasty, just as I am a system.  He is able to annihilate us; therefore, I say, Death to the Guise!”

“I would rather have a peaceful victory, won by time and reason,” said de Beze.

“Time!” exclaimed Calvin, dashing his chair to the ground, “reason!  Are you mad?  Can reason achieve conquests?  You know nothing of men, you who deal with them, idiot!  The thing that injures my doctrine, you triple fool! is the reason that is in it.  By the lightning of Saul, by the sword of Vengeance, thou pumpkin-head, do you not see the vigor given to my Reform by the massacre at Amboise?  Ideas never grow till they are watered with blood.  The slaying of the Duc de Guise will lead to a horrible persecution, and I pray for it with all my might.  Our reverses are preferable to success.  The Reformation has an object to gain in being attacked; do you hear me, dolt?  It cannot hurt us to be defeated, whereas Catholicism is at an end if we should win but a single battle.  Ha! what are my lieutenants?—­rags, wet rags instead of men! white-haired cravens! baptized apes!  O God, grant me ten years more of life!  If I die too soon the cause of true religion is lost in the hands of such boobies!  You are as great a fool as Antoine de Navarre!  Out of my sight!  Leave me; I want a better negotiator than you!  You are an ass, a popinjay, a poet!  Go and make your elegies and your acrostics, you trifler!  Hence!”

The pains of his body were absolutely overcome by the fire of his anger; even the gout subsided under this horrible excitement of his mind.  Calvin’s face flushed purple, like the sky before a storm.  His vast brow shone.  His eyes flamed.  He was no longer himself.  He gave way utterly to the species of epileptic motion, full of passion, which was common with him.  But in the very midst of it he was struck by the attitude of the two witnesses; then, as he caught the words of Chaudieu saying to de Beze, “The Burning Bush!” he sat down, was silent, and covered his face with his two hands, the knotted veins of which were throbbing in spite of their coarse texture.

Some minutes later, still shaken by this storm raised within him by the continence of his life, he said in a voice of emotion:—­

“My sins, which are many, cost me less trouble to subdue, than my impatience.  Oh, savage beast! shall I never vanquish you?” he cried, beating his breast.

“My dear master,” said de Beze, in a tender voice, taking Calvin’s hand and kissing it, “Jupiter thunders, but he knows how to smile.”

Calvin looked at his disciple with a softened eye and said:—­

“Understand me, my friends.”

“I understand that the pastors of peoples bear great burdens,” replied Theodore.  “You have a world upon your shoulders.”

“I have three martyrs,” said Chaudieu, whom the master’s outburst had rendered thoughtful, “on whom we can rely.  Stuart, who killed Minard, is at liberty—­”

“You are mistaken,” said Calvin, gently, smiling after the manner of great men who bring fair weather into their faces as though they were ashamed of the previous storm.  “I know human nature; a man may kill one president, but not two.”

“Is it absolutely necessary?” asked de Beze.

“Again!” exclaimed Calvin, his nostrils swelling.  “Come, leave me, you will drive me to fury.  Take my decision to the queen.  You, Chaudieu, go your way, and hold your flock together in Paris.  God guide you!  Dinah, light my friends to the door.”

“Will you not permit me to embrace you?” said Theodore, much moved.  “Who knows what may happen to us on the morrow?  We may be seized in spite of our safe-conduct.”

“And yet you want to spare them!” cried Calvin, embracing de Beze.  Then he took Chaudieu’s hand and said:  “Above all, no Huguenots, no Reformers, but Calvinists!  Use no term but Calvinism.  Alas! this is not ambition, for I am dying,—­but it is necessary to destroy the whole of Luther, even to the name of Lutheran and Lutheranism.”

“Ah! man divine,” cried Chaudieu, “you well deserve such honors.”

“Maintain the uniformity of the doctrine; let no one henceforth change or remark it.  We are lost if new sects issue from our bosom.”

We will here anticipate the events on which this Study is based, and close the history of Theodore de Beze, who went to Paris with Chaudieu.  It is to be remarked that Poltrot, who fired at the Duc de Guise fifteen months later, confessed under torture that he had been urged to the crime by Theodore de Beze; though he retracted that avowal during subsequent tortures; so that Bossuet, after weighing all historical considerations, felt obliged to acquit Beze of instigating the crime.  Since Bossuet’s time, however, an apparently futile dissertation, apropos of a celebrated song, has led a compiler of the eighteenth century to prove that the verses on the death of the Duc de Guise, sung by the Huguenots from one end of France to the other, was the work of Theodore de Beze; and it is also proved that the famous song on the burial of Marlborough was a plagiarism on it.[]

[] One of the most remarkable instances of the transmission of songs is that of Marlborough.  Written in the first instance by a Huguenot on the death of the Duc de Guise in 1563, it was preserved in the French army, and appears to have been sung with variations, suppressions, and additions at the death of all generals of importance.  When the intestine wars were over the song followed the soldiers into civil life.  It was never forgotten (though the habit of singing it may have lessened), and in 1781, sixty years after the death of Marlborough, the wet-nurse of the Dauphin was heard to sing it as she suckled her nursling.  When and why the name of the Duke of Marlborough was substituted for that of the Duc de Guise has never been ascertained.  See “Chansons Populaires,” par Charles Nisard:  Paris, Dentu, 1867.—­Tr.