evrier. An emissary of the duke, of high rank,
kinsman to Bonivard, came to St. Victor and offered the prior
magnificent inducements to aid in the plot. With a gravity that must
have convulsed the spectators if there had been any, Bonivard pointed to
his monastic gown, his prayer-book and his crucifix, and pleaded his
deep sense of the sacredness of his office as a reason for having
nothing to do with the affair. "Then," says his kinsman, rising in
wrath, "I will do the business myself. I'll have Levrier out of his bed
and over in Savoy this very night."--"Do you really mean it, uncle? Give
me your hand!"--"Then you consent, after all, to help me in the
matter?"--"Oh no, uncle: that isn't it. But I know these Genevese are a
hasty sort of folk, and I am just going to raise thirty florins to be
spent in saying masses to-morrow for the repose of your soul." Before
the evening was over, Bonivard found an opportunity of slipping in
disguise over to the house of Levrier and giving a hint of what was
intended: the notes of preparation for resistance that Berthelier and
his friends began at once to make wrought upon the excited nerves of the
ambassador and his armed retinue to such a point that they were fain to
escape from the town by a secret gate before daylight.

The affair of his rescue of Pecolat is another illustration of his
character and of the strange, turbulent age in which he lived; and it
went far to embitter the hatred of the duke and the bishop against him.
This poor fellow was the jester, song-singer and epigrammatist of the
madcap patriots who were associated under the title of "Sons of Geneva."
Under a trumped-up charge of plotting the death of the bishop he was
kidnapped and carried away to one of the castles in the neighborhood,
and there tortured until a false confession was wrung from him
implicating Berthelier and others. To secure his condemnation to death
he was brought back into the city and presented before the court; but
the sight of the poor cripple, racked and bruised with recent tortures,
and his steadfastness in recanting his late confession, wrought more
with the judges than the fear of the duke, and he was acquitted. But the
feeble and ferocious bishop, moved partly by malignity and partly, no
doubt, by sincere and cowardly terror, was resolved to kill him; and by
some fiction declaring him to have been in the minor orders, he clapped
him into the bishop's prison, claiming to try him by ecclesia