Francis I. appeared to be shaken, but yet he saw great difficulties. The queen begged him to send for Roussel and the two Augustine monks, Courault and Berthaud: 'They will show you, I have no doubt,' she said, 'that the thing is practicable.' The king was curious, says an historian, and accepted the offer. The three evangelicals were taken from their prison and conveyed to the Louvre, where the queen presented them to her brother. She was full of joy: the matter of the placards, which threatened to ruin everything, might possibly be the means of saving everything. She was deceived. When Francis talked with her, it was no trouble to be like a kind brother with a sister; but in the presence of the two friars and Roussel he was a master. These persons displeased him: the zeal with which they pointed out the errors and abuses of the mass irritated him, and he sent them back hurriedly to prison. Men more zealous than they were, had already left their dungeons for the scaffold.
[209] 'Per universam fere Galliam nocte in omnibus angulis affixerunt manibus.'—Corp. Ref. ii. p. 855.
[210] 'Perturbatus hac re populus, territæ multorum cogitationes, concitati magistrates.'—Ibid. p. 856.
[211] 'Qua quidem in re, nihil differunt a meretricibus.'—See the writing In pontificios mercatores et caupones.—Gerdes, iv. p. 103.
[212] Crespin, Martyrol. fol. 112 verso.
[213] Journal d'un Bourgeois de Paris, published by Lalanne, p. 449.
[214] Fontaine, Hist. Catholique.
[215] 'Ante regis conclave.'—Corp. Ref. ii. p. 856.
[216] Crespin's Martyrologie.
[217] Journal d'un Bourgeois de Paris, p. 449.