Schaff - History of the Christian Church Vol. 8 - Media Sabda Org

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I., grandmother of Henry IV., and a voluminous writer in verse and prose,
was a strange mixture of piety and liberalism, of idealism and sensualism.
She patronized both the Reformation and the Renaissance, Calvin and
Rabelais; she wrote the Mirror of a Sinful Soul, and also the Heptameron
in professed imitation of Boccaccio’s Decamerone; yet she was pure, and
began and closed the day with religious meditation and devotion. After the
death of her royal brother (1547), she retired to a convent as abbess, and
declared on her death-bed that, after receiving extreme unction, she had
protected the Reformers out of pure compassion, and not from any wish to
depart from the faith of her ancestors. f439
Calvin lived at Angoulême with a wealthy friend, Louis du Tillet, who was
canon of the cathedral and curé of Claix, and had acquired on his journeys
a rare library of three or four thousand volumes. f440 He taught him Greek,
and prosecuted his theological studies. He associated with honorable men
of letters, and was highly esteemed by them. f441 He began there the
preparation of his Institutes. f442 He also aided Olivetan in the revision and
completion of the French translation of the Bible, which appeared at
Neuchâtel in June, 1535, with a preface of Calvin. f443
From Angoulême Calvin made excursions to Nérac, Poitiers, Orleans, and
Paris. At Nérac in Béarn, the little capital of Queen Marguerite, he became
personally acquainted with Le Fèvre d’Étaples (Faber Stapulensis), the
octogenarian patriarch of French Humanism and Protestantism. Le Fèvre,
with prophetic vision, recognized in the young scholar the future restorer
of the Church of France. f444 Perhaps he also suggested to him to take
Melanchthon for his model. f445 Roussel, the chaplain and confessor of
Marguerite, advised him to purify the house of God, but not to destroy it.
At Poitiers, Calvin gained several eminent persons for the Reformation.
According to an uncertain tradition he celebrated with a few friends, for
the first time, the Lord’s Supper after the Reformed fashion, in a cave
(grotte de Croutelles) near the town, which long afterwards was called
“Calvin’s Cave.” f446
Towards the close of the year 1534, he ventured on a visit to Paris. There
he met, for the first time, the Spanish physician, Michael Servetus, who had
recently published his heretical book On the Errors of the Trinity, and
challenged him to a disputation. Calvin accepted the challenge at the risk of
his safety, and waited for him in a house in the Rue Saint Antoine; but
Servetus did not appear. Twenty years afterwards he reminded Servetus of