Catherine De Medici

by Honoré de Balzac

“We are to try to understand each other and draw up some public agreement which shall unite the two churches.”

“Ah! if she would only have the courage to separate the French Church from the court of Rome, and create a patriarch for France as they did in the Greek Church!” cried Calvin, his eyes glistening at the idea thus presented to his mind of a possible throne. “But, my son, can the niece of a Pope be sincere? She is only trying to gain time.”

“She has sent away the Queen of Scots,” said Chaudieu.

“One less!” remarked Calvin, as they passed through the Porte de Rive. “Elizabeth of England will restrain that one for us. Two neighboring queens will soon be at war with each other. One is handsome, the other ugly,—a first cause for irritation; besides, there’s the question of illegitimacy—”

He rubbed his hands, and the character of his joy was so evidently ferocious that de Beze shuddered: he saw the sea of blood his master was contemplating.

“The Guises have irritated the house of Bourbon,” said Theodore after a pause. “They came to an open rupture at Orleans.”

“Ah!” said Calvin, “you would not believe me, my son, when I told you the last time you started for Nerac that we should end by stirring up war to the death between the two branches of the house of France? I have, at least, one court, one king and royal family on my side. My doctrine is producing its effect upon the masses. The burghers, too, understand me; they regard as idolators all who go to Mass, who paint the walls of their churches, and put pictures and statues within them. Ha! it is far more easy for a people to demolish churches and palaces than to argue the question of justification by faith, or the real presence. Luther was an argufier, but I,—I am an army! He was a reasoner, I am a system. In short, my sons, he was merely a skirmisher, but I am Tarquin! Yes, my faithful shall destroy pictures and pull down churches; they shall make mill-stones of statues to grind the flour of the peoples. There are guilds and corporations in the States-general—I will have nothing there but individuals. Corporations resist; they see clear where the masses are blind. We must join to our doctrine political interests which will consolidate it, and keep together the materiel of my armies. I have satisfied the logic of cautious souls and the minds of thinkers by this bared and naked worship which carries religion into the world of ideas; I have made the peoples understand the advantages of suppressing ceremony. It is for you, Theodore, to enlist their interests; hold to that; go not beyond it. All is said in the way of doctrine; let no one add one iota. Why does Cameron, that little Gascon pastor, presume to write of it?”

Calvin, de Beze, and Chaudieu were mounting the steep steps of the upper town in the midst of a crowd, but the crowd paid not the slightest attention to the men who were unchaining the mobs of other cities and preparing them to ravage France.

After this terrible tirade, the three marched on in silence till they entered the little place Saint-Pierre and turned toward the pastor’s house. On the second story of that house (never noted, and of which in these days no one is ever told in Geneva, where, it may be remarked, Calvin has no statue) his lodging consisted of three chambers with common pine floors and wainscots, at the end of which were the kitchen and the bedroom of his woman-servant. The entrance, as usually happened in most of the burgher households of Geneva, was through the kitchen, which opened into a little room with two windows, serving as parlor, salon, and dining-room. Calvin’s study, where his thought had wrestled with suffering for the last fourteen years, came next, with the bedroom beyond it. Four oaken chairs covered with tapestry and placed around a square table were the sole furniture of the parlor. A stove of white porcelain, standing in one corner of the room, cast out a gentle heat. Panels and a wainscot of pine wood left in its natural state without decoration covered the walls. Thus the nakedness of the place was in keeping with the sober and simple life of the Reformer.

“Well?” said de Beze as they entered, profiting by a few moments when Chaudieu left them to put up the horse at a neighboring inn, “what am I to do? Will you agree to the colloquy?”