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 time when to travel meant spending eight days on the road from Paris to Calais: he had to put up in inns with very rough fare and sometimes only a bed of straw. Books were now printed, but they still circulated very slowly, and the fame of a professor was made more by "disputation," that is to say, lecture and debate, than by the publication of his writings. Nevertheless, the wandering Italian published several books in every town he visited. With the exception of a few that have been lost, most of his philosophical writings and poems have been collected together and preserved.

Bruno found France torn by internal quarrels between the Protestant Huguenots and the Roman Catholics, which had been going on for some years in the shape of a destructive civil war. Only eight years before, in 1572, there had been a wholesale massacre of Protestants in Paris on St. Bartholomew's Eve, when Charles IX was king. All this served to show Bruno to what excesses men could be driven in religious strife. After a visit to Toulouse, where he taught astronomy and philosophy, he proceeded to Paris. Here, although he refused to attend Mass, he managed to become a professor, chiefly by the favor of King Henry III, who, however, required to be satisfied first of all that Bruno's wonderful memory came "by knowledge and not by magic arts." In gratitude for these favors the philosopher referred to the King in his writings with exaggerated praise. It was in