Large numbers of people from all over the place flocked to Geneva to see Calvin, just as in antiquity people used to flock to Corinth to see the no less notorious and celebrated Laïs. Many entire families went into voluntary exile from France in order to go and live in that dead-end of Savoy where he was to be found, in a town which they liked to call 'Hieropolis', the Holy City...
The first to fall easy victims were, especially, painters, clock-makers, draughtsmen, jewellers, booksellers, printers - all those whose crafts demand a certain degree of superior discernment. For just as the whitest of fabrics stains most readily, dark colour taking more of a hold there, and showing up more clearly, so fancy ideas catch on more readily in minds which are already alert and lively than in those which are coarser and more sluggish. Craftsmen of this kind, behaving as they do as if they were a law unto themselves just as the products of their trades are uncontrolled, making their own decisions, mixing their own colours, keeping their own half-crazy records, muddle up their heads with many fantasies and grotesque ideas. All those genteel Poets with their cultivated sensibility, those refined intellects which penetrate the secrets of the Heavens, readily joined their number. The wise Emperor Marcus Aurelius once said that the frequenters of brothels often turn out to be the most beautiful women in a population, as well as the most handsome and bold of its men, and that the bravest men become bandits, the most cunning become thieves, while those with the liveliest minds go mad. We can certainly confirm that in the early days of the birth of the Heresy, those men who had the keenest intelligence (unless they were also armed with the shield of faith) were the ones par excellence who became its lovers and its courtesans; in their efforts to sink the Church they sank themselves; they used the gifts God had given them as a maniac uses a knife, striking out indiscriminately, and slashing and wounding themselves as well as those around them.
Medical men, it is said, were the first intellectuals who became reluctant to believe anything without good evidence. After they had dissected and explored all the different parts of the science of nature, without having been able to pin down the efficient cause, or the mysterious secrets of the Christian religion (which, being above nature, are by definition inaccessible to all Naturalists), they came to regard most things as matters indifferent, and the rest as impossible, because their best techniques had not been sufficient to penetrate to the heart of the matter. Suddenly waking up to the fact that their religious faith was as insecurely grounded as their science was full of doubt, they threw themselves on the mercy of the sick Heretics, rather than into the arms of the Catholics, who are healthy and sound. Just as the snail prefers to smear its trail over dung than over roses, so they make up their spiritual medicines higgledy-piggledy from any ingredients that come to hand, concocting from fragments of all kinds of other religion, a concoction which is no religion at all...
This story was told to me by one of the most trustworthy witnesses in Guyenne: One day when he was a student, he and some friends of his were strolling about under the arcades of the Schools in Toulouse, all of a sudden the Holy ghost descended upon them. It was not in the form of a dove, or of tongues of flame, but was a new and invisible spirit which kept the name of Calvin and of Geneva humming and singing perpetually in their ears. 'I don't know whether it was a white spirit or a black one, like Zwingli's,' he told me, 'but whatever it was, it affected five or six students simultaneously.' All of them were carried away by the same emotions they abandoned their studies, packed their bags and set off for Geneva, travelling day and night. Their longing to see the holy man lent wings to their feet. From what my informant told me, the gratification they experienced on seeing the sacrosanct city-walls of Geneva was hardly less than the joy of that devout and pious knight Godfrey de Bouillon when his eyes beheld the long-desired walls of Jerusalem.
On their arrival, hearing that the 'exhortation' (as preaching was called there) was in progress, they made their way all out of breath to see Calvin in the pulpit. They were surprised how unattractive and disagreeable he seemed. However, at the end of the service they followed him to his house, and introduced themselves to him. There was a crowd of people pressing about him. Calvin said to them, 'My brothers, it is one of the wonders wrought by the Lord, that he has called you to labour in his vineyard.'
After my informant (and some of the others) had stayed in Geneva for three or four months, and when he had hardly grasped even the first rudiments of Theology, Calvin awarded him the designation of Minister: but although this young man was of a fine intelligence and well-educated in good letters, he felt that he was incapable of fulfilling this charge, and excused himself from taking it on; but Calvin reminded him that the Apostles, ignorant men, had been chosen to confound the knowledge of the world, and pressed him to obey. Théodore de Bèze, Calvin's creature, who will appear in several of the scenes of this Tragedy, was present when he made this refusal, and added his own persuasions, saying that Titus and Amos had taught in the Church when they were much younger than he. 'My brother,' he said - taking a tag from Virgil as if it was a text from Holy Scripture - 'If the Fates call you, grasp it with your hand, for everything will follow easily thereafter.'
At last he was beaten: Calvin held out his hand to him as a sign of association, he became a Minister, although he was still wet behind the ears, and within a few days they had packed him off to Lorraine, having designated him Founder of a Church there. Unfortunately, however, this young hopeful created a scandal in the Church of the Lord. He seduced (or, in fact was seduced by) the daughter of the gentleman in whose house he lodged, or so he tells me. Before he left Geneva Calvin had made him drop his family name and take the pseudonym 'Villeroche', but he got rid of this as soon as he deserted Calvinism. He died a Catholic. In my 'History of the Origins, Progress and Decline of Heresy' I have quite often relied upon his testimony in my account of various secret matters and other particulars about this wretched schism, because he was an active man of business, prominent and engaged, just at the time that the newly-named Huguenotage was coming into being in France.
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