"Apollo, god of medicine, exiled from the rest of the earth, was straying
once across the Narbonnaise in Gaul, seeking to fix his abode there.
Driven from Asia, from Africa, and from the rest of Europe, he wandered
through all the towns of the province in search of a place propitious for
him and for his disciples. At last he perceived a new city, constructed
from the ruins of Maguelonne, of Lattes, and of Substantion. He
contemplated long its site, its aspect, its neighbourhood, and resolved
to establish on this hill of Montpellier a temple for himself and his
priests. All smiled on his desires. By the genius of the soil, by the
character of the inhabitants, no town is more fit for the culture of
letters, and above all of medicine. What site is more delicious and more
lovely? A heaven pure and smiling; a city built with magnificence; men
born for all the labours of the intellect. All around vast horizons and
enchanting sites--meadows, vines, olives, green champaigns; mountains and
hills, rivers, brooks, lagoons, and the sea. Everywhere a luxuriant
vegetation--everywhere the richest production of the land and the water.
Hail to thee, sweet and dear city! Hail, happy abode of Apollo, who
spreadest afar the light of the glory of thy name!"
"This fine tirade," says Dr. Maurice Raynaud--from whose charming book on
the 'Doctors of the Time of Moliere' I quote--"is not, as one might
think, the translation of a piece of poetry. It is simply part of a
public oration by Francois Fanchon, one of the most illustrious
chancellors of the faculty of medicine of Montpellier in the seventeenth
century." "From time immemorial," he says, "'the faculty' of Montpellier
had made itself remarkable by a singular mixture of the sacred and the
profane. The theses which were sustained there began by an invocation to
God, the Blessed Virgin, and St. Luke, and ended by these words:--'This
thesis will be sustained in the sacred Temple of Apollo.'"
But however extravagant Chancellor Fanchon's praises of his native city
may seem, they are really not exaggerated. The Narbonnaise, or
Languedoc, is perhaps the most charming district of charming France. In
the far north-east gleam the white Alps; in the far south-west the white
Pyrenees; and from the purple glens and yellow downs of the Cevennes on
the northwest, the Herault slopes gently down towards the "Etangs," or
great salt-water lagoons, and the vast alluvial flats of the Camargue,
the field of Caius Marius, where still run herds of half-wild horses,
descended from some ancient Roman stock; while beyond all glitters the
blue Mediterranean. The great almond orchards, each one sheet of rose-
colour in spring; the mulberry orchards, the oliveyards, the vineyards,
cover every foot of available upland soil: save where the rugged and arid
downs are sweet with a thousand odoriferous plants, from which the bees
extract the famous white honey of Narbonne. The native flowers and
shrubs, of a beauty and richness rather Eastern than European, have made
the 'Flora Monspeliensis,' and with it the names of Rondelet and his
disciples, famous among botanists; and the strange fish and shells upon
its shores afforded Rondelet materials for his immortal work upon the
'Animals of the Sea.' The innumerable wild fowl of the "Bouches du
Rhone;" the innumerable songsters and other birds of passage, many of
them unknown in these islands, and even in the north of France itself,
which haunt every copse of willow and aspen along the brook sides; the
gaudy and curious insects which thrive beneath that clear, fierce, and
yet bracing sunlight; all these have made the district of Montpellier a
home prepared by Nature for those who study and revere her.
Neither was Chancellor Fanchon misled by patriotism, when he said the
pleasant people who inhabit that district are fit for all the labours of
the intellect. They are a very mixed race, and like most mixed races,
quick-witted, and handsome also. There is probably much Roman blood
among them, especially in the towns; for Languedoc, or Gallia
Narbonnensis, as it was called of old, was said to be more Roman than
Rome itself. The Roman remains are more perfect and more interesting--so
the late Dr. Whewell used to say--than any to be seen now in Italy; and
the old capital, Narbonne itself, was a complete museum of Roman
antiquities ere Francis I. destroyed it, in order to fortify the city
upon a modern system against the invading armies of Charles V. There
must be much Visigothic blood likewise in Languedoc; for the Visigothic
Kings held their courts there from the fifth century, until the time that
they were crushed by the invading Moors. Spanish blood, likewise, there
may be; for much of Languedoc was held in the early Middle Age by those
descendants of Eudes of Acquitaine who established themselves as kings of
Majorca and Arragon; and Languedoc did not become entirely French till
1349, when Philip le Bel bought Montpellier of those potentates. The
Moors, too, may have left some traces of their race behind. They held
the country from about A.D. 713 to 758, when they were finally expelled
by Charles Martel and Eudes. One sees to this day their towers of meagre
stone-work, perched on the grand Roman masonry of those old
amphitheatres, which they turned into fortresses. One may see, too--so
tradition holds--upon those very amphitheatres the stains of the fires
with which Charles Martel smoked them out; and one may see, too, or fancy
that one sees, in the aquiline features, the bright black eyes, the lithe
and graceful gestures, which are so common in Languedoc, some touch of
the old Mahommedan race, which passed like a flood over that Christian
land.
Whether or not the Moors left behind any traces of their blood, they left
behind, at least, traces of their learning; for the university of
Montpellier claimed to have been founded by Moors at a date of altogether
abysmal antiquity. They looked upon the Arabian physicians of the Middle
Age, on Avicenna and Averrhoes, as modern innovators, and derived their
parentage from certain mythic doctors of Cordova, who, when the Moors
were expelled from Spain in the eighth century, fled to Montpellier,
bringing with them traditions of that primeval science which had been
revealed to Adam while still in Paradise; and founded Montpellier, the
mother of all the universities in Europe. Nay, some went further still,
and told of Bengessaus and Ferragius, the physicians of Charlemagne, and
of Marilephus, chief physician of King Chilperic, and even--if a letter
of St. Bernard's was to be believed--of a certain bishop who went as
early as the second century to consult the doctors of Montpellier; and it
would have been in vain to reply to them that in those days, and long
after them, Montpellier was not yet built. The facts are said to be:
that as early as the beginning of the thirteenth century Montpellier had
its schools of law, medicine, and arts, which were erected into a
university by Pope Nicholas IV. in 1289.
The university of Montpellier, like--I believe--most foreign ones,
resembled more a Scotch than an English university. The students lived,
for the most part, not in colleges, but in private lodgings, and
constituted a republic of their own, ruled by an abbe of the scholars,
one of themselves, chosen by universal suffrage. A terror they were
often to the respectable burghers, for they had all the right to carry
arms; and a plague likewise, for, if they ran in debt, their creditors
were forbidden to seize their books, which, with their swords, were
generally all the property they possessed. If, moreover, any one set up
a noisy or unpleasant trade near their lodgings, the scholars could
compel the town authorities to turn him out. They were most of them,
probably, mere boys of from twelve to twenty, living poorly, working
hard, and--those at least of them who were in the colleges--cruelly
beaten daily, after the fashion of those times; but they seem to have
comforted themselves under their troubles by a good deal of wild life out
of school, by rambling into the country on the festivals of the saints,
and now and then by acting plays; notably, that famous one which Rabelais
wrote for them in 1531: "The moral comedy of the man who had a dumb
wife;" which "joyous patelinage" remains unto this day in the shape of a
well-known comic song. That comedy young Rondelet must have seen acted.
The son of a druggist, spicer, and grocer--the three trades were then
combined--in Montpellier, and born in 1507, he had been destined for the
cloister, being a sickly lad. His uncle, one of the canons of
Maguelonne, near by, had even given him the revenues of a small chapel--a
job of nepotism which was common enough in those days. But his heart was
in science and medicine. He set off, still a mere boy, to Paris to study
there; and returned to Montpellier, at the age of eighteen, to study
again.
The next year, 1530, while still a scholar himself, he was appointed
procurator of the scholars--a post which brought him in a small fee on
each matriculation--and that year he took a fee, among others, from one
of the most remarkable men of that or of any age, Francois Rabelais
himself.
And what shall I say of him?--who stands alone, like Shakespeare, in his
generation; possessed of colossal learning--of all science which could be
gathered in his days--of practical and statesmanlike wisdom--of knowledge
of languages, ancient and modern, beyond all his compeers--of eloquence,
which when he speaks of pure and noble things becomes heroic, and, as it
were, inspired--of scorn for meanness, hypocrisy, ignorance--of esteem,
genuine and earnest, for the Holy Scriptures, and for the more moderate
of the Reformers who were spreading the Scriptures in Europe,--and all
this great light wilfully hidden, not under a bushel, but under a
dunghill. He is somewhat like Socrates in face, and in character
likewise; in him, as in Socrates, the demigod and the satyr, the man and
the ape, are struggling for the mastery. In Socrates, the true man
conquers, and comes forth high and pure; in Rabelais, alas! the victor is
the ape, while the man himself sinks down in cynicism, sensuality,
practical jokes, foul talk. He returns to Paris, to live an idle,
luxurious life; to die--says the legend--saying, "I go to seek a great
perhaps," and to leave behind him little save a school of
Pantagruelists--careless young gentlemen, whose ideal was to laugh at
everything, to believe in nothing, and to gratify their five senses like
the brutes which perish. There are those who read his books to make them
laugh; the wise man, when he reads them, will be far more inclined to
weep. Let any young man who may see these words remember, that in him,
as in Rabelais, the ape and the man are struggling for the mastery. Let
him take warning by the fate of one who was to him as a giant to a pigmy;
and think of Tennyson's words:--
"Arise, and fly
The reeling faun, the sensual feast;
Strive upwards, working out the beast,
And let the ape and tiger die."
But to return. Down among them there at Montpellier, like a brilliant
meteor, flashed this wonderful Rabelais, in the year 1530. He had fled,
some say, for his life. Like Erasmus, he had no mind to be a martyr, and
he had been terrified at the execution of poor Louis de Berquin, his
friend, and the friend of Erasmus likewise. This Louis de Berquin, a man
well known in those days, was a gallant young gentleman and scholar,
holding a place in the court of Francis I., who had translated into
French the works of Erasmus, Luther, and Melancthon, and had asserted
that it was heretical to invoke the Virgin Mary instead of the Holy
Spirit, or to call her our Hope and our Life, which titles--Berquin
averred--belonged alone to God. Twice had the doctors of the Sorbonne,
with that terrible persecutor, Noel Beda, at their head, seized poor
Berquin, and tried to burn his books and him; twice had that angel in
human form, Marguerite d'Angouleme, sister of Francis I., saved him from
their clutches; but when Francis--taken prisoner at the battle of
Pavia--at last returned from his captivity in Spain, the suppression of
heresy and the burning of heretics seemed to him and to his mother,
Louise of Savoy, a thank-offering so acceptable to God, that Louis
Berquin--who would not, in spite of the entreaties of Erasmus, purchase
his life by silence--was burnt at last on the Place de Greve, being first
strangled, because he was of gentle blood.
Montpellier received its famous guest joyfully. Rabelais was now forty-
two years old, and a distinguished savant; so they excused him his three
years' undergraduate's career, and invested him at once with the red gown
of the bachelors. That red gown--or, rather, the ragged phantom of it--is
still shown at Montpellier, and must be worn by each bachelor when he
takes his degree. Unfortunately, antiquarians assure us that the
precious garment has been renewed again and again--the students having
clipped bits of it away for relics, and clipped as earnestly from the new
gowns as their predecessors had done from the authentic original.
Doubtless the coming of such a man among them to lecture on the Aphorisms
of Hippocrates, and the Ars Parva of Galen, not from the Latin
translations then in use, "but from original Greek texts, with comments
and corrections of his own, must have had a great influence on the minds
of the Montpellier students; and still more influence--and that not
altogether a good one--must Rabelais' lighter talk have had, as he
lounged--so the story goes--in his dressing-gown upon the public place,
picking up quaint stories from the cattle-drivers off the Cevennes, and
the villagers who came in to sell their olives and their grapes, their
vinegar and their vine-twig faggots, as they do unto this day. To him
may be owing much of the sound respect for natural science, and much,
too, of the contempt for the superstition around them, which is notable
in that group of great naturalists who were boys in Montpellier at that
day. Rabelais seems to have liked Rondelet, and no wonder: he was a
cheery, lovable, honest little fellow, very fond of jokes, a great
musician and player on the violin, and who, when he grew rich, liked
nothing so well as to bring into his house any buffoon or strolling
player to make fun for him. Vivacious he was, hot-tempered, forgiving,
and with a power of learning and a power of work which were prodigious,
even in those hard-working days. Rabelais chaffs Rondelet, under the
name of Rondibilis; for, indeed, Rondelet grew up into a very round, fat,
little man; but Rabelais puts excellent sense into his mouth, cynical
enough, and too cynical, but both learned and humorous; and, if he laughs
at him for being shocked at the offer of a fee, and taking it,
nevertheless, kindly enough, Rondelet is not the first doctor who has
done that, neither will he be the last.
Rondelet, in his turn, put on the red robe of the bachelor, and received,
on taking his degree, his due share of fisticuffs from his dearest
friends, according to the ancient custom of the University of
Montpellier. He then went off to practise medicine in a village at the
foot of the Alps, and, half-starved, to teach little children. Then he
found he must learn Greek; went off to Paris a second time, and
alleviated his poverty there somewhat by becoming tutor to a son of the
Viscomte de Turenne. There he met Gonthier of Andernach, who had taught
anatomy at Louvain to the great Vesalius, and learned from him to
dissect. We next find him setting up as a medical man amid the wild
volcanic hills of the Auvergne, struggling still with poverty, like
Erasmus, like George Buchanan, like almost every great scholar in those
days; for students then had to wander from place to place, generally on
foot, in search of new teachers, in search of books, in search of the
necessaries of life; undergoing such an amount of bodily and mental toil
as makes it wonderful that all of them did not--as some of them doubtless
did--die under the hard training, or, at best, desert the penurious Muses
for the paternal shop or plough.
Rondelet got his doctorate in 1537, and next year fell in love with and
married a beautiful young girl called Jeanne Sandre, who seems to have
been as poor as he.
But he had gained, meanwhile, a powerful patron and the patronage of the
great was then as necessary to men of letters as the patronage of the
public is now. Guillaume Pellicier, Bishop of Maguelonne--or rather then
of Montpellier itself, whither he had persuaded Paul II. to transfer the
ancient see--was a model of the literary gentleman of the sixteenth
century; a savant, a diplomat, a collector of books and manuscripts,
Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac, which formed the original nucleus of the
present library of the Louvre; a botanist, too, who loved to wander with
Rondelet collecting plants and flowers. He retired from public life to
peace and science at Montpellier, when to the evil days of his master,
Francis I., succeeded the still worse days of Henry II., and Diana of
Poitiers. That Jezebel of France could conceive no more natural or easy
way of atoning for her own sins than that of hunting down heretics, and
feasting her wicked eyes--so it is said--upon their dying torments.
Bishop Pellicier fell under suspicion of heresy: very probably with some
justice. He fell, too, under suspicion of leading a life unworthy of a
celibate churchman, a fault which--if it really existed--was, in those
days, pardonable enough in an orthodox prelate, but not so in one whose
orthodoxy was suspected. And for a while Pellicier was in prison. After
his release he gave himself up to science, with Rondelet, and the school
of disciples who were growing up around him. They rediscovered together
the Garum, that classic sauce, whose praises had been sung of old by
Horace, Martial, and Ausonius; and so childlike, superstitious if you
will, was the reverence in the sixteenth century for classic antiquity,
that when Pellicier and Rondelet discovered that the Garum was made from
the fish called Picarel--called Garon by the fishers of Antibes, and
Giroli at Venice, both these last names corruptions of the Latin
Gerres--then did the two fashionable poets of France, Etienne Dolet and
Clement Marot, think it not unworthy of their muse to sing the praises of
the sauce which Horace had sung of old. A proud day, too, was it for
Pellicier and Rondelet, when wandering somewhere in the marshes of the
Camargue, a scent of garlic caught the nostrils of the gentle bishop, and
in the lovely pink flowers of the water-germander he recognised the
Scordium of the ancients. "The discovery," says Professor Planchon,
"made almost as much noise as that of the famous Garum; for at that
moment of naive fervour on behalf of antiquity, to rediscover a plant of
Dioscorides or of Pliny was a good fortune and almost an event."
I know not whether, after his death, the good bishop's bones reposed
beneath some gorgeous tomb, bedizened with the incongruous half-Pagan
statues of the Renaissance: but this, at least, is certain, that
Rondelet's disciples imagined for him a monument more enduring than of
marble or of brass, more graceful and more curiously wrought than all the
sculptures of Torrigiano or Cellini, Baccio Bandinelli or Michael Angelo
himself. For they named a lovely little lilac snapdragon, _Linaria
Domini Pellicerii_,--"Lord Pellicier's toad-flax;" and that name it will
keep, we may believe, as long as winter and summer shall endure.
But to return. To this good patron--who was the Ambassador at Venice--the
newly-married Rondelet determined to apply for employment; and to Venice
he would have gone, leaving his bride behind, had he not been stayed by
one of those angels who sometimes walk the earth in women's shape. Jeanne
Sandre had an elder sister, Catherine, who had brought her up. She was
married to a wealthy man, but she had no children of her own. For four
years she and her good husband had let the Rondelets lodge with them, and
now she was a widow, and to part with them was more than she could bear.
She carried Rondelet off from the students who were seeing him safe out
of the city, brought him back, settled on him the same day half her
fortune, and soon after settled on him the whole, on the sole condition
that she should live with him and her sister. For years afterwards she
watched over the pretty young wife and her two girls and three boys--the
three boys, alas! all died young--and over Rondelet himself, who,
immersed in books and experiments, was utterly careless about money; and
was to them all a mother, advising, guiding, managing, and regarded by
Rondelet with genuine gratitude as his guardian angel.
Honour and good fortune, in the worldly sense, now poured in upon the
druggist's son. Pellicier, his own bishop, stood godfather to his first-
born daughter. Montluc, Bishop of Valence, and that wise and learned
statesman, the Cardinal of Tournon, stood godfathers a few years later to
his twin boys; and what was of still more solid worth to him, Cardinal
Tournon took him to Antwerp, Bordeaux, Bayonne, and more than once to
Rome; and in these Italian journeys of his he collected many facts for
the great work of his life, that 'History of Fishes' which he dedicated,
naturally enough, to the cardinal. This book with its plates is, for the
time, a masterpiece of accuracy. Those who are best acquainted with the
subject say, that it is up to the present day a key to the whole
ichthyology of the Mediterranean. Two other men, Belon and Salviani,
were then at work on the same subject, and published their books almost
at the same time; a circumstance which caused, as was natural, a three-
cornered duel between the supporters of the three naturalists, each party
accusing the other of plagiarism. The simple fact seems to be that the
almost simultaneous appearance of the three books in 1554-5 is one of
those coincidences inevitable at moments when many minds are stirred in
the same direction by the same great thoughts--coincidences which have
happened in our own day on questions of geology, biology, and astronomy;
and which, when the facts have been carefully examined, and the first
flush of natural jealousy has cooled down, have proved only that there
were more wise men than one in the world at the same time.
And this sixteenth century was an age in which the minds of men were
suddenly and strangely turned to examine the wonders of nature with an
earnestness, with a reverence, and therefore with an accuracy, with which
they had never been investigated before. "Nature," says Professor
Planchon, "long veiled in mysticism and scholasticism, was opening up
infinite vistas. A new superstition, the exaggerated worship of the
ancients, was nearly hindering this movement of thought towards facts.
Nevertheless learning did her work. She rediscovered, reconstructed,
purified, commented on the texts of ancient authors. Then came in
observation, which showed that more was to be seen in one blade of grass
than in any page of Pliny. Rondelet was in the middle of this crisis a
man of transition, while he was one of progress. He reflected the past;
he opened and prepared the future. If he commented on Dioscorides, if he
remained faithful to the theories of Galen, he founded in his 'History of
Fishes' a monument which our century respects. He is above all an
inspirer, an initiator; and if he wants one mark of the leader of a
school, the foundation of certain scientific doctrines, there is in his
speech what is better than all systems, the communicative power which
urges a generation of disciples along the path of independent research,
with Reason for guide, and Faith for aim."
Around Rondelet, in those years, sometimes indeed in his house--for
professors in those days took private pupils as lodgers--worked the group
of botanists whom Linnaeus calls "the Fathers," the authors of the
descriptive botany of the sixteenth century. Their names, and those of
their disciples and their disciples again, are household words in the
mouth of every gardener, immortalised, like good Bishop Pellicier, in the
plants which have been named after them. The Lobelia commemorates Lobel,
one of Rondelet's most famous pupils, who wrote those 'Adversaria' which
contain so many curious sketches of Rondelet's botanical expeditions, and
who inherited his botanical (as Joubert his biographer inherited his
anatomical) manuscripts. The Magnolia commemorates the Magnols; the
Sarracenia, Sarrasin of Lyons; the Bauhinia, Jean Bauhin; the Fuchsia,
Bauhin's earlier German master, Leonard Fuchs; and the Clusia--the
received name of that terrible "Matapalo," or "Scotch attorney," of the
West Indies, which kills the hugest tree, to become as huge a tree
itself--immortalizes the great Clusius, Charles de l'Escluse, citizen of
Arras, who after studying civil law at Louvain, philosophy at Marburg,
and theology at Wittemberg under Melancthon, came to Montpellier in 1551,
to live in Rondelet's own house, and become the greatest botanist of his
age.
These were Rondelet's palmy days. He had got a theatre of anatomy built
at Montpellier, where he himself dissected publicly. He had, says
tradition, a little botanic garden, such as were springing up then in
several universities, specially in Italy. He had a villa outside the
city, whose tower, near the modern railway station, still bears the name
of the "Mas de Rondelet." There, too, may be seen the remnants of the
great tanks, fed with water brought through earthen pipes from the
Fountain of Albe, wherein he kept the fish whose habits he observed.
Professor Planchon thinks that he had salt-water tanks likewise; and thus
he may have been the father of all "Aquariums." He had a large and
handsome house in the city itself, a large practice as physician in the
country round; money flowed in fast to him, and flowed out fast likewise.
He spent much upon building, pulling down, rebuilding, and sent the bills
in seemingly to his wife and to his guardian angel Catherine. He himself
had never a penny in his purse: but earned the money, and let his ladies
spend it; an equitable and pleasant division of labour which most married
men would do well to imitate. A generous, affectionate, careless little
man, he gave away, says his pupil and biographer, Joubert, his valuable
specimens to any savant who begged for them, or left them about to be
stolen by visitors, who, like too many collectors in all ages, possessed
light fingers and lighter consciences. So pacific was he meanwhile, and
so brave withal, that even in the fearful years of the troubles, he would
never carry sword, nor even tuck or dagger; but went about on the most
lonesome journeys as one who wore a charmed life, secure in God and in
his calling, which was to heal, and not to kill.
These were the golden years of Rondelet's life; but trouble was coming on
him, and a stormy sunset after a brilliant day. He lost his sister-in-
law, to whom he owed all his fortunes, and who had watched ever since
over him and his wife like a mother; then he lost his wife herself under
most painful circumstances; then his best-beloved daughter. Then he
married again, and lost the son who was born to him; and then came, as to
many of the best in those days, even sorer trials, trials of the
conscience, trials of faith.
For in the mean time Rondelet had become a Protestant, like many of the
wisest men round him; like, so it would seem from the event, the majority
of the university and the burghers of Montpellier. It is not to be
wondered at. Montpellier was a sort of half-way resting-place for
Protestant preachers, whether fugitive or not, who were passing from
Basle, Geneva, or Lyons, to Marguerite of Navarre's little Protestant
court at Pau or at Nerac, where all wise and good men, and now and then
some foolish and fanatical ones, found shelter and hospitality. Thither
Calvin himself had been, passing probably through Montpellier, and
leaving--as such a man was sure to leave--the 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 monks who for a whole generation, in every
university and school in France, had been howling down sound science, as
well as sound religion; and at Montpellier in 1560-1, their debt was paid
them in a very ugly way. News came down to the hot southerners of
Languedoc of the so-called conspiracy of Amboise.--How the Duc de Guise
and the Cardinal de Lorraine had butchered the best blood in France under
the pretence of a treasonable plot; how the King of Navarre and the
Prince de Conde had been arrested; then how Conde and Coligny were ready
to take up arms at the head of all the Huguenots of France, and try to
stop this lifelong torturing, by sharp shot and cold steel; then how in
six months' time the king would assemble a general council to settle the
question between Catholics and Huguenots. The Huguenots, guessing how
that would end, resolved to settle the question for themselves. They
rose in one city after another, sacked the churches, destroyed the
images, put down by main force superstitious processions and dances; and
did many things only to be excused by the exasperation caused by thirty
years of cruelty. At Montpellier there was hard fighting, murders--so
say the Catholic historians--of priests and monks, sack of the new
cathedral, destruction of the noble convents which lay in a ring round
Montpellier. The city and the university were in the hands of the
Huguenots, and Montpellier became Protestant on the spot.
Next year came the counter blow. There were heavy battles with the
Catholics all round the neighbourhood, destruction of the suburbs,
threatened siege and sack, and years of misery and poverty for
Montpellier and all who were therein.
Horrible was the state of France in those times of the wars of religion
which began in 1562; the times which are spoken of usually as "The
Troubles," as if men did not wish to allude to them too openly. Then,
and afterwards in the wars of the League, deeds were done for which
language has no name. The population decreased. The land lay untilled.
The fair face of France was blackened with burnt homesteads and ruined
towns. Ghastly corpses dangled in rows upon the trees, or floated down
the blood-stained streams. Law and order were at an end. Bands of
robbers prowled in open day, and bands of wolves likewise. But all
through the horrors of the troubles we catch sight of the little fat
doctor riding all unarmed to see his patients throughout Languedoc; going
vast distances, his biographers say, by means of regular relays of
horses, till he too broke down. Well for him, perhaps, that he broke
down when he did; for capture and recapture, massacre and pestilence,
were the fate of Montpellier and the surrounding country, till the better
times of Henry IV. and the Edict of Nantes in 1598, when liberty of
worship was given to the Protestants for a while.
In the burning summer of 1566 Rondeletius went a long journey to
Toulouse, seemingly upon an errand of charity, to settle some law affairs
for his relations. The sanitary state of the southern cities is bad
enough still. It must have been horrible in those days of barbarism and
misrule. Dysentery was epidemic at Toulouse then, and Rondelet took it.
He knew from the first that he should die. He was worn out, it is said,
by over-exertion; by sorrow for the miseries of the land; by fruitless
struggles to keep the peace, and to strive for moderation in days when
men were all immoderate. But he rode away a day's journey--he took two
days over it, so weak he was--in the blazing July sun, to a friend's sick
wife at Realmont, and there took to his bed, and died a good man's death.
The details of his death and last illness were written and published by
his cousin Claude Formy; and well worth reading they are to any man who
wishes to know how to die. Rondelet would have no tidings of his illness
sent to Montpellier. He was happy, he said, in dying away from the tears
of his household, and "safe from insult." He dreaded, one may suppose,
lest priests and friars should force their way to his bedside, and try to
extort some recantation from the great savant, the honour and glory of
their city. So they sent for no priest to Realmont: but round his bed a
knot of Calvinist gentlemen and ministers read the Scriptures, and sang
David's psalms, and prayed; and Rondelet prayed with them through long
agonies, and so went home to God.
The Benedictine monk-historian of Languedoc, in all his voluminous
folios, never mentions, as far as I can find, Rondelet's existence. Why
should he? The man was only a druggist's son and a heretic, who healed
diseases, and collected plants, and wrote a book on fish. But the
learned men of Montpellier, and of all Europe, had a very different
opinion of him. His body was buried at Realmont: but before the schools
of Toulouse they set up a white marble slab, and an inscription thereon
setting forth his learning and his virtues; and epitaphs on him were
composed by the learned throughout Europe, not only in French and Latin,
but in Greek, Hebrew, and even Chaldee.
So lived and so died a noble man; more noble--to my mind--than many a
victorious warrior, or successful statesman, or canonised saint. To know
facts, and to heal diseases, were the two objects of his life. For them
he toiled, as few men have toiled; and he died in harness, at his
work--the best death any man can die.