et Promoteur du Chapitre. He married Jeanne le Franc, thé daughter of a well-to-do and retired innkeeper, described by a Catholic historian as a "most beautiful woman," and by a local tradition as " remarkably devout." Beza says that the family was honourable and of moderate means; and he adds that the father was a man of good understanding and counsel, and therefore much in request among the neighbouring nobility. To this couple were born four sons and two daughters, John being the second son. The father, who intended the boy for the Church, had the successful man's belief in a liberal education, and obtained for him, just as the modern father seeks a scholarship or exhibition, first, the revenues of a chapel in the cathedral, and some years later those of a neighbouring curacy. Among the local gentry was the distinguished family of Montmor. One of them, Charles de Hangest, was from 1501 to 1525 Bishop of Noyon; and his nephew Jean held the same episcopate for the succeeding fifty-two years. This. Jean quarrelled lustily with the Chapter, which disliked his manners, his dress, his beard, and possibly also the tolerance of heresy which made him " suspect dans sa foi et odieux à l'Église et à FÉtat." It is probable that his friendship with this episcopal race helped Gérard to rise, and also hastened his fall. Whatever the cause-whether financial embarrassments, personal attachments, dubious orthodoxy, or all three combined-his later years were more troubled than his earlier; and he died in 1531 under the Ban of the Church. There is no evidence of any latent Protestantism either in him or in his family at this time, though four years later John had become the hope of the stern and unbending Reformers, and within five years the eldest son Charles had died as une âme damnée, for he refused on his deathbed to receive the Sacraments of the Church.
Calvin's education began in the bosom of the Montmor family, not indeed as a matter of charity, but, as Beza tells us, at the charges of his father; and though Calvin never forgot that he was "unus de plèbe homundo" yet he was always grateful for the early associations which gave to his mind and bearing a characteristic distinction. In 1523 he was sent to Paris, where he entered as a student of Arts the College de la Marche, whence he passed, for his later and more special studies, to the College de Montaigu. The University of Paris was old and famous, but its then state was not equal to its age or its fame. Erasmus describes how the students were mobbed and hunted on the streets, the sort of houses, no better than lupanaria, which they frequented or lodged in, the filthy language they heard or used, the still filthier deeds they were expected to do or suffer. Rabelais' Panurge comes to Paris skilled in a host of tongues, but malfaisant, pipeur, beuveur, bateur de pavez, ribleur, averse to no form of mischief or pruriency. James Dryander, brother of Francis, one of Calvin's innumerable correspondents, describes the prœceptorculi and the magistelli of the University as
