ous title-pages,[563] was largely increased. It now assumed,
however, a more stealthy and cautious character.

[Sidenote: Execution of Brugiere.]

[Sidenote: The tailor of the Rue St. Antoine.]

Blood flowed in every part of the kingdom. Not only the capital, but
also the provinces furnished their constant witnesses to the truth of
the "Lutheran" doctrines. The noted trial and execution of John Brugiere
revealed to the First President of Parliament the humiliating fact that
the Reformation had gained a strong foothold in his native
Auvergne.[564] At Paris, one Florence Venot was confined seven weeks in
a cell upon the construction of which so much perverted ingenuity had
been expended that the prisoner could neither lie down nor stand erect,
and the hour of release from weary torture was waited for with ardent
longing, even if it led to the stake.[565] But the death of a nameless
tailor has, by the singularity of its incidents, acquired a celebrity
surpassing that of any other martyrdom in the early part of this reign.
In the midst of the tourneys and other festivities provided to signalize
the occasion of the queen's coronation and his own solemn entry into
Paris, the desire seized Henry to see with his own eyes and to
interrogate one of the members of the sect to whose account such serious
charges were laid. A poor tailor, arrested in his shop in the Rue St.
Antoine, a few paces from the royal palace, for the crime of working on
a day which the church had declared holy, was brought before him. So
contemptible a dialectician could do little, it was presumed, to shake
the faith of the Very Christian King. But the result disappointed the
expectations of the courtiers and ecclesiastics that were present. The
tailor answered with respectful boldness to the questions propounded by
Chatellain, Bishop of Macon, a prelate once favorable to the
Reformation. Hereupon Diana of Poitiers, an interested opponent, whose
coffers were being filled with the goods of condemned heretics,
undertook to silence him with the tongue of a witty woman. The tailor,
who had patiently borne the ridicule and scorn with which he had
hitherto been treated, turned upon the mistress of the king a look of
solemn warning as he said: "Madam, let it suffice you to have infected
France, without desiring to mingle your poison and filth with so holy
and sacred a thing as the true religion of our Lord Jesus Christ." The
courtiers were thunderstruck at the tur