He seems to have lived in the house of Wolmar; another inmate was Théodore de Bèze, the future leader of the Protestants of France, then a boy of twelve. The death of his father (May 26th, 1531) left Calvin his own master. He had obeyed the paternal wishes when he studied for the Church in Paris; he had obediently transferred himself to the study of law; he now resolved to follow the bent of his own mind, and, dedicating himself to study, to become a man of letters. He returned to Paris and entered the College Fortet, meaning to attend the lectures of the Humanist professors whom Francis I., under the guidance of Budé and Cop, was attracting to his capital. These "royal lecturers" and their courses of instruction were looked on with great suspicion by the Sorbonne, and Calvin's conduct in placing himself under their instruction showed that he had already emancipated himself from that strict devotion to the "superstitions of the Papacy" to which he tells us that he was obstinately attached in his boyhood. He soon became more than the pupil of Budé, Cop, and other Humanists. He was a friend, admitted within the family circle. He studied Greek with Pierre Danès and Hebrew under Vatable. In due time (April 1532), when barely twenty-three years of age, he published at his own expense his first book, a learned commentary on the two books of Seneca's _De Clementia_. The book is usually referred to as an example of precocious erudition. The author shows that he knew as minutely as extensively the whole round of classical literature accessible to his times. He quotes, and that aptly, from fifty-five separate Latin authors--from thirty-three separate works of Cicero, from all the works of Horace and Ovid, from five comedies of Terence, and from all the works of Virgil. He quotes from twenty-two separate Greek authors--from five or six of the principal writings of Aristotle, and from four of the writings of Plato and of Plutarch. Calvin does not quote Plautus, but his use of the phrase _remoram facere_ makes it likely that he was well acquainted with that writer also.[103] The future theologian was also acquainted with many of the Fathers--with Augustine, Lactantius, Jerome, Synesius, and Cyprian. Erasmus had published an edition of Seneca, and had advised scholars to write commentaries, and young Calvin followed the advice of the Prince of Humanists. Did he imitate him in more? Did Calvin also disdain to use the New Learning merely to display scholarship, did he mean to put it to modern uses? Francis I. was busy with one of his sporadic persecutions of the Huguenots when the book was published, and learned conjectures have been made whether the two facts had any designed connection--An exhortation addressed to an emperor to exercise clemency, and a king engaging in persecuting his subjects. Two things seem to show that Calvin meant his book to be a protest against the persecution of the French Protestants. His preface is a daring attack on