* *

Palissy had been working for eight years in Paris when the massacre of
St. Bartholomew took place. No one sought to harm the potter, Huguenot
though he was, and he lived on peacefully, respected by all, for some
time longer.

In 1574 Charles IX., the well-intentioned, half-mad young king, died,
and his brother Henry, a man in every way much worse than himself, came
to the throne. Like the rest of his family, however, he was fond of art,
and protected the potter, and a few months later we find Palissy, quite
unharmed, giving lectures on natural history to some of the most famous
scientific men in Paris. If he wanted to prove a point he had a quantity
of drawings or materials at hand to show them. He spoke well, and the
fame of his lectures spread. The little room was soon filled to
overflowing with lawyers, scholars, and, above all, physicians, the
celebrated monsieur Ambroise Pare, doctor to the queen-mother, and a
Huguenot like himself, at their head.

* * * * *

During nine years Palissy continued to deliver these lectures every
Lent, working steadily most of the day among his furnaces at the
Tuileries. He was now seventy-five, and had escaped so many dangers that
he might well think himself safe to the end, which could not be far off.
But in 1585 Henry III. thought himself obliged to take more active
measures against the Huguenots. Palissy had never concealed--as he had
never obtruded--his faith, and, most likely at the instigation of
someone who envied him, he was at once sent to the prison of the
Bastille, and sentence of death passed upon him.

Yet once again the potter's gift for making friends, perhaps the most
valuable of all his talents in that fierce age, stood him in good stead.
This time it was actually one of the persecuting Guises, the duc de
Mayenne, who saved him, and prevented the decree from being carried out.

For four years Palissy remained a prisoner. Mayenne desired to set him
free, but did not dare to do so, so left him where he was till better
times came. But Palissy had a surer friend than Mayenne, who came to his
rescue. In spite of his strong frame, years passed in a prison of those
days, where hunger, cold, and dirt would break any man down, proved too
much even for Bernard Palissy, now more than eighty years of age. Little
by little he grew weaker, watched and tended, as far as might be, by
those who, like himself, had suffered for consci