Ruined, banished, exhausted by the torture, Giovellino had come to France, where he played his sweet-toned bag-pipe from door to door, for a crust of bread; and, Providence having guided him to the marquis's door, he was taken in, nursed, cured, entertained by him, and—which was worth far more to the poor fellow—appreciated and loved. He had told him of his misfortunes in writing.
Bois-Doré was neither a scholar nor a philosopher; he had become interested in him at first as a man who was persecuted, as he himself had been for a long time, by Catholic intolerance. He would not, however, have become attached to a savage, violent sectary, of the type of a goodly number of Huguenots, who were no less addicted to persecution in those days than their adversaries. He had a vague knowledge of the blasphemies imputed to Giordano Bruno; he bade Giovellino explain his doctrines to him. The mute wrote rapidly, and with that refined lucidity of expression which great minds were beginning not to disdain, wishing to instruct everybody, even the common herd, in those great questions which Galileo was already investigating in the domain of pure science.
The marquis enjoyed this conversation in writing, in which the essential points were summarized soberly, and without the inevitable digressions of speech. Gradually he conceived an enthusiastic, passionate interest in these new definitions which afforded him repose and relieved him from tedious disputes. He desired to read an exposition of Giordano's ideas, also of those of his predecessor Vanini. Lucilio was able to express them so that he could understand them, pointing out the weak or false passages, in order to lead him to the only conclusions which human knowledge asserts with certainty to-day: a creation as infinite as the Creator, an infinity of stars peopling infinite space, not to serve as luminaries and objects of interest to our little planet, but as sources and sustenance of universal life.
This was very easy to understand, and man had understood it ever since the first ray of genius had made itself manifest in mankind. But the doctrines of the Church in the Middle Ages had reduced God and Heaven to the proportions of our little world, and the marquis thought that he was dreaming when he learned that the existence of the real universe was not—as he had always imagined, so he said—a poet's fancy.
He did not rest until he had procured a telescope, and he expected, the dear man, to see the inhabitants of the moon distinctly, his ideas were raised so high. He had to abandon that hope; but he passed all his evenings reading Giovellino's explanation of the movements of the stars, and of the wonderful celestial mechanism, which Galileo was destined to be condemned to abjure as heretical, a few years later, under torture, on his knees, with a torch in his hand.
[XI]
"Well," cried the marquis, while his friend ate, hastening as a matter of course, although his amiable and obliging host urged him to take his time, "what have you done to-day, my redoubtable scholar? Yes, I understand, pages of fine writing. Do not lose a line, I pray you! Those are words of refined gold which will go down to posterity; for these days of gloom will go hence into the dungeons of the past! Meanwhile, always conceal your sheets carefully in the secret drawer of the cupboard I have had placed in your chamber, when you do not write in mine."
The mute made a sign that he had been writing in the marquis's study, and that his sheets were in a certain ebony casket where the marquis kept them. He made himself understood by gestures with great ease.
"That is still better," continued Bois-Doré; "they are even safer there, as no woman enters the room. It is not that I distrust Bellinde, but she seems to me altogether too devoutly inclined since the arrival of this new rector whom Monseigneur de Bourges has sent us, and who is not to be compared, I fear, with our old friend the former curé, whom we owed to the last archbishop, Jean de Beaune.
"Ah! if only we had retained that excellent prelate, with his flowing beard, his gigantic stature, his fat paunch, his Gargantuan appetite, his handsome face, his great mind and his vast learning! one of the shrewdest and best men in the kingdom, although, to look at him, one would have taken him for a bon vivant and nothing more!