Farel was a chivalrous Frenchman, born among the mountains of Dauphiné, whose courage, amounting to reckless daring, won for him the passionate admiration of soldiers like Wildermuth,[97] and made him volunteer to lead any forlorn hope however desperate. He was sympathetic to soft-heartedness, yet utterly unable to restrain his tongue; in danger of his life one week because of his violent language, and the next almost adored, by those who would have slain him, for the reckless way in which he nursed the sick and dying during a visitation of the plague. He was the brilliant partisan leader, seeing only what lay before his eyes; incapable of self-restraint; a learned theologian, yet careless in his expression of doctrine, and continually liable to misapprehension. No one was better fitted to attack the enemy's strongholds, few less able to hold them when once possessed. He saw, without the faintest trace of jealousy--the man was too noble--others building on the foundations he had laid. It is almost pathetic to see that none of the Romance Swiss churches whose Apostle he had been, cared to retain him as their permanent leader. In the closing years of his life he went back to his beloved France, and ended as he had begun, a pioneer evangelist in Lyons, Metz, and elsewhere,--a leader of forlorn hopes, carrying within him a perpetual spring and the effervescing recklessness of youth. He had early seen that the pioneer life which he led was best lived without wife or children, and he remained unmarried until his sixty-ninth year. Then he met with a poor widow who had lost husband and property for religion's sake in Rouen, and had barely escaped with life. He married her because in no other way could he find for her a home and protection. Geneva needed a man of altogether different mould of character to do the work that was now necessary. When Farel's anxieties and vexations were at their height, he learned almost by accident that a distinguished young French scholar, journeying from Ferrara to Basel, driven out of his direct course by war, had arrived in Geneva, and was staying for a night in the town. This was Calvin. § 4. _Calvin: Youth and Education._ Jean Cauvin (latinised into Calvinus) was born at Noyon in Picardy on the 10th of July 1509. He was the second son in a family of four sons and two daughters. His father, Gerard Cauvin, was a highly esteemed lawyer, the confidential legal adviser of the nobility and higher clergy of the district. His mother, Jeanne La France, a very beautiful woman, was noted for her devout piety and her motherly affection. Calvin, who says little about his childhood, relates how he was once taken by his mother on the festival of St. Anna to see a relic of the saint preserved in the Abbey of Ourscamp, near Noyon, and that he remembers kissing "part of the body of St. Anna, the mother of the Virgin Mary."[98]