§ 76. CALVIN AS A WANDERING EVANGELIST. 323
native city of Angouleme. This highly gifted lady (1492- 1549), the sister of Kiug Francis I., grandmother of Henry IV., and a voluminous writer in verse and prose, was a strange mixture of piety and liberalism, of idealism and sensualism. She patronized both the Reformation and the Renaissance, Calvin and Rabelais ; she wrote the Mirror of a Sinful Soul, and also the Heptameron in professed imitation of Boccaccio's Decamerone ; yet she was pure, and began and closed the day with religious meditation and devotion. After the death of her royal brother (1547), she retired to a convent as abbess, and declared on her death-bed that, after receiving extreme unction, she had protected the Reformers out of pure compassion, and not from any wish to depart from the faith of her ancestors.^
Calvin lived at Angouleme with a wealthy friend, Louis du Tillet, who was canon of the cathedral and cur^ of Claix, and had acquired on his journeys a rare library of three or four thousand volumes.^ He taught him Greek, and prosecuted his theological studies. He associated wdth honorable men of letters, and was highly esteemed by them.^ He began there the preparation of his Institutes.^ He also aided Olivetan in the revision and completion of the French translation of the Bible, which appeared at Neuchatel in June, 1535, with a preface of Calvin.^
1 Dyer {Life of Calvin, p. 18) says of her . " Plato's divine and earthly.love never met more conspicuously in a human being," and quotes the remark of M. Genin, the editor of her correspondence : " Le trait saiUant du caractere de Marguerite c'est d' avoir allietoute sa vie les ide'es religieuses et les id^es d'amour mondain."
2 Ep. 20, Op. X. Pt. I. 37. Florimond de Rsemond (p. 883) extends Calvin's sojourn at Angouleme to three years, which is evidently an error.
3 Florimond de Efemond : " // estoit en bonne estime' et re'putation, aim€ de tons ceux qui aimoient les lettres."
* According to the same Roman Catholic historian.
5 Ep. 29 in Op. X. Pars I. 51 ; the preface in vol. IX. 787-790. Beza (followed by Stahelin, t. 88) makes him take part also in the first edition, which appeared in 1534, and contained only the New Testamenc. But this seems to be an error. See Reuss, " Revue de Theologie," 1866, No. III. 318, and Kampschulte, I. 247 ; also Herminjard, III. 349, note 8.
324 THE REFORMATION IN FRENCH SWITZERLAND.
From Angouleme Calvin made excursions to Nerac, Poitiers, Orleans, and Paris. At N^rac in Beam, the little capital of Queen Marguerite, he became personally acquainted with Le Fevre d'Etaples (Faber Stapulensis), the octogenarian patriarch of French Humanism and Protestantism. Le F^vre, with prophetic vision, recognized in the young scholar the future restorer of the Church of France.^ Perhaps he also suggested to him to take Melanchthon for his model.^ Roussel, the chaplain and confessor of Marguerite, advised him to purify the house of God, but not to destroy it.
At Poitiers, Calvin gained several eminent persons for the Reformation. According to an uncertain tradition he celebrated with a few friends, for the first time, the Lord's Supper after the Reformed fashion, in a cave (^grotte de Croutelles) near the town, which long afterwards was called " Calvin's Cave." 3
Towards the close of the year 1534, he ventured on a visit to Paris. There he met, for the first time, the vSpanish physician, Michael Servetus, who had recently published his heretical book On the Errors of the Trinity^ and challenged him to a disputation. Calvin accepted the challenge at the risk of his safety, and waited for him in a house in the Rue Saint Antoine ; but Servetus did not appear. Twenty years afterwards he reminded Servetus of this interview : " You know that at that time I was ready to do everything for you, and did not even count my life too dear that I might convert you from your errors." Would that he had succeeded at that time, or never seen the unfortunate heretic again.
^ Beza (XXI. 123) : " Excepit juvenem [ Calvinum'] bonus senex et libenter vidit, futurum augurans insigne coclestis in Gallia instaurandi regni instriimentum."
2 According to Florimond de Ksemond.
8 Bayle, Art. Calvin and La Place. Crottet, Petite Chronique Protestants de France, 96 sqq. Stahelin, 1. 32. Lefranc, 120. Herminjard, III. 202, note 4.