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 a while 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 Horace, Martial, and Ausonius; and so childlike, 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 rediscover 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.