No doubt the sale of his Bibles in Paris, the great book-mart of the day, excited a considerable cabal against Faust, on the part of the scribes; who would readily enough assert that such works could only have been produced by the aid of witchcraft. An assertion of this nature was, at that time, dangerous in the extreme to the party against whom it was made. Authors, writing shortly after the time of Faust’s visit, say that such a charge was made, and that he had to leave the city in consequence. The most effectual way of rebutting it would be the avowal of the method adopted in bringing out the work, and this was done by the insertion, in freshly printed leaves, of the words mentioned in page 358 as having been omitted from the early copies. It has been urged, that it was impossible for Faust to have attempted the imposition of passing these Bibles off as manuscripts, inasmuch as he had already divulged the fact of his printing such works in the imprint to the Psalter of 1457. But that imprint applied to that work alone; and Faust, who was a sharp man of business, would not have purposely omitted from the imprint to the Bible, that part of the sentence which notified that the work was done “by a newly invented art of casting letters, printing,” &c., unless he had intended to derive a profit by so doing. There does not however, seem to be any foundation for the assertion that he was brought to trial. His absence from Paris was a very temporary one. It is certain he was well received by persons of eminence there, and ultimately succeeded in establishing an agency for the sale of his books in the city, in spite of the opposition of the scribes. In 1466, he made another business visit to Paris, where he was taken ill, and died, as some suppose, of a pestilence which was raging at the time, to which, as he was then seventy-one years of age, he would have fallen an easy victim. His remains were interred with honor, in the Church of St. Victor. “An anniversary mass was afterwards appointed to be said for the repose of his soul, on the presentation by Peter Schoiffher and Conrad Fust of a copy of the ‘Epistles of Jerome,’ printed on parchment, and considered so important a work, that the Abbé of St. Victor deemed it right to pay back the sum of twelve gold crowns, the work exceeding by that sum the value of the fees due for the annual masses. This fact is contained in an entry in the ‘Necrology of St. Victor,’ which is preserved at Paris, in the Bibliothèque Nationale, (MSS. fonds St. Victor). The copy of the ‘Epistles of St. Jerome’ here alluded to is now in the library of the Arsenal.”[138]