"Where are you going, Master John," he demanded, "in this fine disguise?"
"Where God shall please," answered Calvin, who then began to explain the motive and reasons of his disguise. "And would you not do better to return to Noyon and to God?" asked the canon, looking at him sadly. Calvin was a moment silent, then, taking the priest's hand--"Thank you," said he, "but it is too late."
During this colloquy the lieutenant was searching Calvin's papers, and secured those which might have compromised the friends of the fugitive.
Calvin found a refuge with the Queen of Navarre, who was fortunate enough to reconcile her _protégé_ with the court and the university. The person whom she employed to effect this was an adroit man who had succeeded in deceiving the government. Francis I based his glory upon the patronage and encouragement which he accorded to learning, and Calvin, as a man of letters, merited consideration. The King needed some forgiveness for serious political faults, and, with reason, he believed that the humanists would redeem his character before the people. He was at once the protector and the slave of the _literati_.
At that period the little court of Nérac was the asylum of writers, who, like Desperriers, there prepared their _Cymbalum Mundi_; of gallant ladies, who composed love-tales, of which they were often the heroines themselves; of poets, who extemporized odes after Beza's model; of clerics and other gentry of the Church, who entertained packs of hunting-dogs, and courtesans; of Italian play-actors, who, in the Queen's theatre, presented comedies taken from the New Testament, in which Jesus was made to utter horrible things against monks and nuns; or of princes, who, like the Queen's husband, scarcely knew how to read, and yet discoursed, like doctors, about doctrine and discipline.
It was against Roussel, the confessor of Margaret, that Calvin, at a later date, composed his _Adversus Nicodemitas_. At Nérac he found Le Fevre d'Etaples, who had fled the wrath of the Sorbonne, and who "regarded the young man with a benignant eye, predicting that he was to become the author of the restoration of the Church in France." Le Fevre recalls to our mind that priest about whom Mathesius tells us, who said to Luther, when sick: "My child, you will not die; God has great designs in your regard." As to the rest, James le Fevre d'Etaples was a sufficiently charitable and honest man. He died a Catholic, and very probably without ever having prophesied in the terms mentioned by Beza.