Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/19

Rh general of the bailiwick of Fontenay-le-Comte; Geoffroi d'Estissac, who became Bishop of Maillezais; and the four brothers du Bellay, who rose to high rank in the Church and State, one of them being made cardinal. When old enough for the novitiate, he unfortunately left the learned Benedictines for the ignorant and bigoted Franciscans, entering their convent of Fontenay-le-Comte in Lower Poitou, where he took priest's orders in 1511. He carried on his studies with the passionate ardour which distinguished the great scholars of the Renaissance, having but one friend in the convent, Pierre Amy, who shared them with him, and who, like himself, corresponded in Greek with Budæus. The other monks regarded with profound distrust and antagonism this devotion to profane learning, and especially to the diabolical Greek; and at last the superiors made a visit of inquisition to the cells of the two students, and the chapter confiscated their Greek books and manuscripts. Then, it is said. Amy was frightened or won over to be the accuser of Rabelais, though of what he accused his old friend is not recorded—perhaps of heresies uttered confidentially. It is certain that soon afterwards Rabelais was put in pace—that is to say, condemned to imprisonment for life in an underground dungeon of the monastery, on a diet of bread and water: the Church had always such honey-sweet names for its most atrocious cruelties! Thus, when an heresiarch like Giordano Bruno was handed over to the secular power to be burnt alive, the ecclesiastical formula ran: "To be punished as gently as possible, and without effusion of blood." Many reasons have been given for the