The Sorbonne, on the other hand, which together with the University of Oxford stood firmly for orthodoxy and the Old Learning, knew of no mercy when her authority was questioned and could always count upon the hearty coöperation of the king of France and his hangman.
And alas! Rabelais, as soon as he left school, was a marked man. Not because he liked to drink good wine and told funny stories about his fellow-monks. He had done much worse, he had succumbed to the lure of the wicked Greek tongue.
When rumor thereof had first reached the abbot of his cloister, it was decided to search his cell. It was found to be full of literary contraband, a copy of Homer, one of the New Testament, one of Herodotus.
This was a terrible discovery and it had taken a great deal of wire-pulling on the part of his influential friends to get him out of this scrape.
It was a curious period in the development of the Church.
Originally, as I told you before, the monasteries had been advance posts of civilization and both friars and nuns had rendered inestimable service in promoting the interest of the Church. More than one Pope, however, had foreseen the danger that might come from a too powerful development of the monastic institutions. But as so often happens, just because every one knew that something ought to be done about these cloisters, nothing was ever done.
Among the Protestants there seems to be a notion that the Catholic Church is a placid institution which is run silently and almost automatically by a small body of haughty autocrats and which never suffers from those inner upheavals which are an integral part of every other organization composed of ordinary mortals.
Nothing is further from the truth.
Perhaps, as is so often the case, this opinion has been caused by the misinterpretation of a single word.