Protestantism in France From Death of Francis I to Edict of Nantes - James Aitken Wylie

"The genius of the son," says his biographer
Gabutius, "fitted him for higher things than the
manual labors that occupied his parents. The spirit
of God excited him to that mode of life by which
he might the more signally serve God and,
escaping the snares of earth, attain the heavenly
felicity."[2] He was marked from his earliest years
by an austere piety.
Making St. Dominic, the founder of the
Inquisition, his model, and having, it would seem,
a natural predilection for this terrible business, he
entered a Dominican convent at the age of
fourteen. He obeyed, body and soul, the laws of his
order. The poverty which his vow enjoined he
rigidly practiced. Of the alms which he collected he
did not retain so much as would buy him a cloak
for the winter; and he fortified himself against the
heats of summer by practizing a severe abstinence.
He labored to make his fellow-monks renounce
their slothful habits, their luxurious meals, and
their gay attire, and follow the same severe,
mortified, and pious life with himself. If not very
successful with them, he continued nevertheless to
291