On the 20th of February, Besançon Hugues appeared before the council and resigned all his functions. 'I am growing old,' he said (he was only forty-five); 'I have many children, and I desire to devote myself to my own affairs.' There is no doubt that the motives assigned by Hugues had some part in his determination; we may, however, ask if they were the only ones. He watched attentively the movement of men's minds in Geneva, and, being devoted to Roman-catholicism and the bishop, he could not help seeing that the opposite party was gaining more followers every day. He had spared neither time, trouble, fortune, nor health to bring about the alliance with the Swiss. Seeing that it existed no longer solely in the parchments of the archives, but in the hearts of the people, he thought that he had fulfilled his task, and that for the new work Geneva ought to have new leaders. If Hugues was not old, he was ailing; he already felt the approaches of that disease which carried him off a few months later. He declined rapidly, and breathed his last towards the end of the year.
The death of Besançon Hugues did not proceed from an ordinary sickness: he died of a broken heart. Although still a catholic, at the moment when the Reform was about to enter his country, a crown ought to be laid upon his grave. The continual anxiety which the perils of Geneva had caused him; more than forty official missions; his incessant labours in the Genevan cause; the new burdens continually imposed upon him; the reverses which rent his heart; his precipitate flight, his dangers on the roads and in the cities, cold, watchings, and the cares of a family—('I commend to you my poor household,' he said sometimes in his letters to the council); his disappointments; the reproaches he had to endure from both parties; his struggles with the pensioners, the agents of Savoy, the knights of the Spoon, and some of his fellow-citizens—all these vexations contributed to his disease and death. The head of Besançon Hugues did not fall under the sword of the executioner, like those of Berthelier and Lévrier; but the pacific hero sank under the weight of fatigue and sorrow. An invisible sword struck him; and it may be said that the deaths of the three great men of Genevan emancipation were the deaths of martyrs.
[876] Registres du Conseil du 11 octobre 1531.
[877] 'Alii impune injuria afficiuntur.'—Zwingl. Epp. ii. p. 648.
[878] 'Nihil pene non licet Friburgensibus in pios.'—Ibid.
[879] 'Indicta causa, rapiuntur in carceres.'—Zwingl. Epp. ii. p. 648.
[880] 'Non putarim senatum Bernensem olim ita laturum levem injuriam in nuntium sicut gravem in Evangelium perfert.'—Ibid.
[881] Registres du Conseil du 2 janvier 1532.
[882] Registres du Conseil des 7, 8, 9 janvier 1532. Savyon, Annales.
[883] Calvin on 1 Peter i. 7.