he Club of the Jacobins. In this way an eminent
magistrate of Geneva was condemned to two months' imprisonment, the loss
of all his offices, and the right of ever obtaining others "because he
led a disorderly life and was intimate with Calvin's enemies." Calvin
thus became a legislator. He created the austere, sober, commonplace,
and hideously sad, but irreproachable manners and customs which
characterize Geneva to the present day,--customs preceding those of
England called Puritanism, which were due to the Cameronians, disciples
of Cameron (a Frenchman deriving his doctrine from Calvin), whom Sir
Walter Scott depicts so admirably. The poverty of a man, a sovereign
master, who negotiated, power to power, with kings, demanding armies and
subsidies, and plunging both hands into their savings laid aside for the
unfortunate, proves that thought, used solely as a means of domination,
gives birth to political misers,--men who enjoy by their brains only,
and, like the Jesuits, want power for power's sake. Pitt, Luther,
Calvin, Robespierre, all those Harpagons of power, died without a penny.
The inventory taken in Calvin's house after his death, which comprised
all his property, even his books, amounted in value, as history records,
to two hundred and fifty francs. That of Luther came to about the same
sum; his widow, the famous Catherine de Bora, was forced to petition for
a pension of five hundred francs, which as granted to her by an Elector
of Germany. Potemkin, Richelieu, Mazarin, those men of thought and
action, all three of whom made or laid the foundation of empires, each
left over three hundred millions behind them. They had hearts; they
loved women and the arts; they built, they conquered; whereas with the
exception of the wife of Luther, the Helen of that Iliad, all the others
had no tenderness, no beating of the heart for any woman with which to
reproach themselves.

[*] _Momerie_.

This brief digression was necessary in order to explain Calvin's
position in Geneva.

During the first days of the month of February in the year 1561, on a
soft, warm evening such as we may sometimes find at that season on Lake
Leman, two horsemen arrived at the Pre-l'Eveque,--thus called because
it was the former country-place of the Bishop of Geneva, driven from
Switzerland about thirty years earlier. These horsemen, who no doubt
knew the laws of Geneva about the closing of the gates (then a necessity
and now very ridiculous) r