Page:Margaret of Angoulême, Queen of Navarre (Robinson 1886).djvu/108

Rh, Alexander Rauconet, Musurus, Paul Paradis, Vatable, Toussaint, Danès, scholars and philologists, these men, who did for France what Pico and Politian did for Italy, gathered, as round a sanctuary altar, round this printing-press of the Estiennes. Through them, no less than through the humane Margaret, the brilliant Cardinal du Bellay, the profound Budé, it was rendered possible for Francis to found the College of France.

The university was no shelter to men such as these. "Græcum est, non legitur," taught the Sorbonne; "Cette langue enfante toutes les hérésies," preached the monks; and if Greek, the tongue of pagans, were forbidden, yet more intolerable was Hebrew, the language of the Jews. To shut France close within the narrow fold of Rome, ignorant of any tongue but her own, dreaming of no glory and no ideal but the supremacy of the Church; this was the aim of the Sorbonne. But the aim of the King was to throw wide every gate and break down every barrier, to open the East and welcome the learning of the Arab and the prowess of the Turk; to ransack the past for the guidance of the present; to establish a France which should face the glories of Greece and Rome and not be abashed: a France of palaces, peopled with artists and scholars, splendid in battle, yet more redoubtable in her invincible peace; a Catholic France, which, holding one hand to Soliman, the other to the heretic North, should reconcile humanity.

For eight years the King, a true Valois, audacious in conceiving, slow in the act, had revolved in his mind this glorious idea. In 1529, urged by Margaret and the scholars of her court, he gave it the first germlike shape. No sooner was it founded, than far and