But the camera would have been set up in one of the windows across the way had there been a lively demand upon the thrifty Swiss for mementoes of the Reformer. John Calvin is out of fashion on the Continent, and Geneva is not an exception to the prevalent obsoleteness of reverence for his character and doctrines.
“Fanatique!” ejaculated a Genevese lady who worshiped statedly in the Protestant Cathedral, and called herself “dévôte.”
Our friend Mrs. G—— the artist, par excellence, of our happy family, had made an excellent copy of an original portrait of Calvin which M. Reviliod had, as an especial favor, lent her from his fine collection of pictures, a compliment of which we were proud for her. Herself the daughter of a clergyman who had fought a good fight for the truth as he held it, she had copied the picture con amore.
“I have lived in Calvin’s age—not in this, while I painted,” she said when I looked into her parlor to see how the work was getting on. “An age that needed such men! The face is not lovely in any sense, but I have laid in each stroke tenderly. My father used to say that the Church at large owes more to-day to John Calvin than to any other one man who ever lived.”
The face was, as she had said, not lovely. It was not benign. The hollow temples, deep-set eyes; the small, resolute mouth were the lineaments of an ascetic whose warfare with the world, the flesh and the devil—and the church he conceived in his honest, stubborn soul to be a compound of all three—was to the death. He wore the Genevan cap and gown, the latter trimmed with fur. His black beard was long, but scanty. One thin hand was lifted slightly in exhortation. A man of power, he was one whom not many would dare to love.
“Greater in thought and in action than Luther; as brave as Zwingli; as zealous as Knox!” pursued his admirer, touching the canvas lightly with her brush, as if reluctant to demit the work. “Ah, mademoiselle!” to the entering visitor, the Genevese Protestant aforesaid. “You are just in time to see my finished Calvin!”
Then, the Genevese said, with a grimace, “Fanatique! Moi, je déteste cet homme!”
If she had been one man, the artist another—(and unregenerate) I am afraid the predestined portion of the last speaker would have been a blow of the maul-stick.
The Genevese have swung completely around the circle in three hundred years.
“They would be insupportable to me, and I to them!” replied Calvin to the recall of the Council after his two years of banishment.