Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/137

 Dotnnergjie : Jca7i Calvin, III. i 2 7 ]ean Calvin: Ics Homines et les Glioses de son Temps. Par Emile DouMERGUE, Professeur a la Faculte de Theologie de ^lontau- ban. Tome III., La ville, la inaison ct la rue de Calvin. (Lau- sanne : Georges Bridel et Cie. 1905. Pp. ix, 722.) Professor Doumergue's third volume bears the entirely deserved men- tion: " Ouvrage couronne par I'Academie franqaise (Prix Guizot)". It is devoted to the town of Geneva, the Geneva of the sixteenth century, out of which Calvin's genius made the bulwark of French Reformation, the first of Puritan states and, in the world of thought, the metropolis of a new, far-reaching Commonwealth. That town of Geneva began to disappear outwardly, some fifty years ago. when its old ramparts, its gray stony towers, were levelled down by a nineteenth-century government, which thought it advisable to make a clean sweep of everything of the past, and the work of destruction has gone very fast during the last decades under the combined influences of time and architects. To revive the same it really needed the pen of an artist and a scholar like Doumergue, lifted over insuperable difficulties by a powerful, never-failing enthusiasm. For achieving such a task he is entitled to the grateful acknowledgment, not only of the Genevese, but of the students of history everywhere. The present volume, lavishly illustrated like the others, contains, in quotations of documents, in reproductions of old engravings of scenes, interiors, costumes, even in the reconstruction of perspectives and sites, all that can possibly be placed under the eyes of an inquirer. The whole is worked up with a skill, a mastery of details, a richness of style which I have no more to introduce to the readers of the American Historical Review. To quote an instance of the fullness of information which will be found, I only refer to the chapter, in three parts, entitled: "Calvin's income." No less than a complete essay in economics, concerning espe- cially the relation of prices and values in the middle of the sixteenth century, is here before us. It has enabled the writer to refute victori- ously the gross exaggerations, the calumnies, which from Bolsec down to J.-B.-G. Galiffe and even Kampschulte, who did not take sufficient care to scrutinize Galiffe's aspersions on that point, have totally obscured the subject. It is now at last a settled matter. Far from drawing from the town a fat prebend, as was said and repeated, the intellectual ruler of Geneva lived and died, if not in poverty, at any rate in the straitened circumstances which were then the city's own. This book is at the same time a study in archaeology and in biography. After having shown his readers through Calvin's house, which he had to rebuild for the occasion on documentary evidence, the author gives an impressive and exact account of the reformer's daily life, of his stupendous, never-ceasing work, of the bodily sufferings which made the latter part of his life akin to martyrdom. After having paid his debt to Calvin, he undertakes to give us biographic studies of every one