al science, and much,
too, of the contempt for the superstition around them, which is notable
in that group of great naturalists who were boys in Montpellier at that
day. Rabelais seems to have liked Rondelet, and no wonder: he was a
cheery, lovable, honest little fellow, very fond of jokes, a great
musician and player on the violin, and who, when he grew rich, liked
nothing so well as to bring into his house any buffoon or strolling
player to make fun for him. Vivacious he was, hot-tempered, forgiving,
and with a power of learning and a power of work which were prodigious,
even in those hard-working days. Rabelais chaffs Rondelet, under the
name of Rondibilis; for, indeed, Rondelet grew up into a very round, fat,
little man; but Rabelais puts excellent sense into his mouth, cynical
enough, and too cynical, but both learned and humorous; and, if he laughs
at him for being shocked at the offer of a fee, and taking it,
nevertheless, kindly enough, Rondelet is not the first doctor who has
done that, neither will he be the last.

Rondelet, in his turn, put on the red robe of the bachelor, and received,
on taking his degree, his due share of fisticuffs from his dearest
friends, according to the ancient custom of the University of
Montpellier. He then went off to practise medicine in a village at the
foot of the Alps, and, half-starved, to teach little children. Then he
found he must learn Greek; went off to Paris a second time, and
alleviated his poverty there somewhat by becoming tutor to a son of the
Viscomte de Turenne. There he met Gonthier of Andernach, who had taught
anatomy at Louvain to the great Vesalius, and learned from him to
dissect. We next find him setting up as a medical man amid the wild
volcanic hills of the Auvergne, struggling still with poverty, like
Erasmus, like George Buchanan, like almost every great scholar in those
days; for students then had to wander from place to place, generally on
foot, in search of new teachers, in search of books, in search of the
necessaries of life; undergoing such an amount of bodily and mental toil
as makes it wonderful that all of them did not--as some of them doubtless
did--die under the hard training, or, at best, desert the penurious Muses
for the paternal shop or plough.

Rondelet got his doctorate in 1537, and next year fell in love with and
married a beautiful young girl called Jeanne Sandre, who seems to have
been as poor as he.

But he had gained, mean