From Rise of Protestantism in France to Publication of the Institutes - James Aitken Wylie

etter qualities.
The men of letters who had shed a lustre upon
his court and realm were beginning to withdraw.
They were terrified by the stakes which they saw
around them, not knowing but that their turn might
come next. The monks were again looking up,
which augured no good for the interests of
learning.
Not content with the executions of the terrible
21st of January, the king continued to issue edicts
against the sect of "Lutherans still swarming in the
realm;" he wrote to the provincial parliaments,
exhorting them to furnish money and prisons for
the extirpation [2] of heresy; lastly, he indited an
ordinance declaring printing abolished all over
France, under pain of the gallows.[3] That so
barbarous a decree should have come from a prince
who gloried in being the leader of the literary
movements of his age, would not have been
credible had it not been narrated by historians of
name. It is one among a hundred proofs that
literary culture is no security against the spirit of
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