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, meanwhile, 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 awhile 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