hout Languedoc; going
vast distances, his biographers say, by means of regular relays of
horses, till he too broke down. Well for him, perhaps, that he broke
down when he did; for capture and recapture, massacre and pestilence,
were the fate of Montpellier and the surrounding country, till the better
times of Henry IV. and the Edict of Nantes in 1598, when liberty of
worship was given to the Protestants for a while.

In the burning summer of 1566 Rondeletius went a long journey to
Toulouse, seemingly upon an errand of charity, to settle some law affairs
for his relations. The sanitary state of the southern cities is bad
enough still. It must have been horrible in those days of barbarism and
misrule. Dysentery was epidemic at Toulouse then, and Rondelet took it.
He knew from the first that he should die. He was worn out, it is said,
by over-exertion; by sorrow for the miseries of the land; by fruitless
struggles to keep the peace, and to strive for moderation in days when
men were all immoderate. But he rode away a day's journey--he took two
days over it, so weak he was--in the blazing July sun, to a friend's sick
wife at Realmont, and there took to his bed, and died a good man's death.
The details of his death and last illness were written and published by
his cousin Claude Formy; and well worth reading they are to any man who
wishes to know how to die. Rondelet would have no tidings of his illness
sent to Montpellier. He was happy, he said, in dying away from the tears
of his household, and "safe from insult." He dreaded, one may suppose,
lest priests and friars should force their way to his bedside, and try to
extort some recantation from the great savant, the honour and glory of
their city. So they sent for no priest to Realmont: but round his bed a
knot of Calvinist gentlemen and ministers read the Scriptures, and sang
David's psalms, and prayed; and Rondelet prayed with them through long
agonies, and so went home to God.

The Benedictine monk-historian of Languedoc, in all his voluminous
folios, never mentions, as far as I can find, Rondelet's existence. Why
should he? The man was only a druggist's son and a heretic, who healed
diseases, and collected plants, and wrote a book on fish. But the
learned men of Montpellier, and of all Europe, had a very different
opinion of him. His body was buried at Realmont: but before the schools
of Toulouse they set up a white marble slab, and an inscription thereon