while, a powerful patron and the patronage of the
great was then as necessary to men of letters as the patronage of the
public is now. Guillaume Pellicier, Bishop of Maguelonne--or rather then
of Montpellier itself, whither he had persuaded Paul II. to transfer the
ancient see--was a model of the literary gentleman of the sixteenth
century; a savant, a diplomat, a collector of books and manuscripts,
Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac, which formed the original nucleus of the
present library of the Louvre; a botanist, too, who loved to wander with
Rondelet collecting plants and flowers. He retired from public life to
peace and science at Montpellier, when to the evil days of his master,
Francis I., succeeded the still worse days of Henry II., and Diana of
Poitiers. That Jezebel of France could conceive no more natural or easy
way of atoning for her own sins than that of hunting down heretics, and
feasting her wicked eyes--so it is said--upon their dying torments.
Bishop Pellicier fell under suspicion of heresy: very probably with some
justice. He fell, too, under suspicion of leading a life unworthy of a
celibate churchman, a fault which--if it really existed--was, in those
days, pardonable enough in an orthodox prelate, but not so in one whose
orthodoxy was suspected. And for a while Pellicier was in prison. After
his release he gave himself up to science, with Rondelet, and the school
of disciples who were growing up around him. They rediscovered together
the Garum, that classic sauce, whose praises had been sung of old by
Horace, Martial, and Ausonius; and so childlike, superstitious if you
will, was the reverence in the sixteenth century for classic antiquity,
that when Pellicier and Rondelet discovered that the Garum was made from
the fish called Picarel--called Garon by the fishers of Antibes, and
Giroli at Venice, both these last names corruptions of the Latin
Gerres--then did the two fashionable poets of France, Etienne Dolet and
Clement Marot, think it not unworthy of their muse to sing the praises of
the sauce which Horace had sung of old. A proud day, too, was it for
Pellicier and Rondelet, when wandering somewhere in the marshes of the
Camargue, a scent of garlic caught the nostrils of the gentle bishop, and
in the lovely pink flowers of the water-germander he recognised the
Scordium of the ancients. "The discovery," says Professor Planchon,
"made almost as much noise as that of the famous Garum; for at that
mo