These were the golden years of Rondelet’s life; but trouble was coming on him, and a stormy sunset after a brilliant day.  He lost his sister-in-law, to whom he owed all his fortunes, and who had watched ever since over him and his wife like a mother; then he lost his wife herself under most painful circumstances; then his best-beloved daughter.  Then he married again, and lost the son who was born to him; and then came, as to many of the best in those days, even sorer trials, trials of the conscience, trials of faith.

For in the meantime Rondelet had become a Protestant, like many of the wisest men round him; like, so it would seem from the event, the majority of the university and the burghers of Montpellier.  It is not to be wondered at.  Montpellier was a sort of halfway resting-place for Protestant preachers, whether fugitive or not, who were passing from Basle, Geneva, or Lyons, to Marguerite of Navarre’s little Protestant court at Pan or at Nerac, where all wise and good men, and now and then some foolish and fanatical ones, found shelter and hospitality.  Thither Calvin himself had been, passing probably through Montpellier and leaving—­as such a man was sure to leave—­the mark of his foot behind him.  At Lyons, no great distance up the Rhone, Marguerite had helped to establish an organised Protestant community; and when in 1536 she herself had passed through Montpellier, to visit her brother at Valence, and Montmorency’s camp at Avignon, she took with her doubtless Protestant chaplains of her own, who spoke wise words—­it may be that she spoke wise words herself—­to the ardent and inquiring students of Montpellier.  Moreover, Rondelet and his disciples had been for years past in constant communication with the Protestant savants of Switzerland and Germany, among whom the knowledge of nature was progressing as it never had progressed before.  For—­it is a fact always to be remembered—­it was only in the free air of Protestant countries the natural sciences could grow and thrive.  They sprung up, indeed, in Italy after the restoration of Greek literature in the fifteenth century; but they withered there again only too soon under the blighting upas shade of superstition.  Transplanted to the free air of Switzerland, of Germany, of Britain, and of Montpellier, then half Protestant, they developed rapidly and surely, simply because the air was free; to be checked again in France by the return of superstition with despotism super-added, until the eve of the great French Revolution.

So Rondelet had been for some years Protestant.  He had hidden in his house for a long while a monk who had left his monastery.  He had himself written theological treatises:  but when his Bishop Pellicier was imprisoned on a charge of heresy, Rondelet burnt his manuscripts, and kept his opinions to himself.  Still he was a suspected heretic, at last seemingly a notorious one; for only the year before his death, going to visit patients at Perpignan, he was waylaid by the Spaniards, and had to get home through bypasses of the Pyrenees, to avoid being thrown into the Inquisition.