Horace, Martial, and Ausonius; and so child-like, 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 moment of naive fervour on behalf of antiquity, to re-discover a plant of Dioscorides or of Pliny was a good fortune and almost an event.”

I know not whether, after his death, the good bishop’s bones reposed beneath some gorgeous tomb, bedizened with the incongruous half-Pagan statues of the Renaissance; but this at least is certain, that Rondelet’s disciples imagined for him a monument more enduring than of marble or of brass, more graceful and more curiously wrought than all the sculptures of Torrigiano or Cellini, Baccio Bandinelli or Michael Angelo himself.  For they named a lovely little lilac snapdragon, Linaria Domini Pellicerii—­“Lord Pellicier’s toad-flax;” and that name it will keep, we may believe, as long as winter and summer shall endure.

But to return.  To this good Patron—­who was the Ambassador at Venice—­the newly-married Rondelet determined to apply for employment; and to Venice he would have gone, leaving his bride behind, had he not been stayed by one of those angels who sometimes walk the earth in women’s shape.  Jeanne Sandre had an elder sister, Catharine, who had brought her up.  She was married to a wealthy man, but she had no children of her own.  For four years she and her good husband had let the Rondelets lodge with them, and now she was a widow, and to part with them was more than she could bear.  She carried Rondelet off from the students who were seeing him safe out of the city, brought him back, settled on him the same day half her fortune, and soon after settled on him the whole, on the sole condition that she should live with him and her sister.  For years afterwards she watched over the pretty young wife and her two girls and three boys—­the three boys, alas! all died young—­and over Rondelet himself, who, immersed in books and experiments, was utterly careless about money; and was to them all a mother—­advising, guiding, managing, and regarded by Rondelet with genuine gratitude as his guardian angel.