Although most historians date the close of the Middle Ages and the beginnings of modern Europe from the era of the Protestant Reformation, spanning the period from 1517 to about 1560, Grenoble remained for a hundred years longer a mediæval city in every sense of the word. France continued a Catholic country, and Grenoble, sequestered in a southern province, scarcely felt the disquieting breath of the great religious revolution which was sweeping mid-Europe. Its ideas and its civilization changed little, even while fresh consciousness of its natural powers and material resources was impregnating the city with new industries. The spirit of craftsmanship—that joyous love of perfection, not only in the fine but also in the useful arts, which characterized the Renaissance—was still the ruling temper of its citizens; and the guild of glovers, the most numerous and influential of all the artisans, particularly personified this civic character. If we would gain some notion of the part glove-making actually played in the lives of these people, and the status of the glove-craft as it first appeared in mediæval Europe, we have only to journey in imagination to Grenoble in the middle of the seventeenth century, on the occasion of the great annual festival of the glovers. It is a clear, tranquil morning in the latter part of July, 1650, and the sun, scarcely an hour’s march above the mountains, is flooding with almost tropic brilliancy the matchless paradise of the Dauphiné. In its confluence of rivers and fair valleys, the ancient capital city, Grenoble, shines in the midst of the green plain of Grésivaudan. Impossible to describe the ever-changing charm of the horizons!—as, from the city itself, the eye sweeps eastward, northward, westward, over range upon range of snow-crowned mountains, under a sky so pure, so glowing, that distant peaks apparently loom near, and the cool breath of Alpine heights gently smites the cheek. Eastward, the prongs, the pinnacles, the clear-cut outlines of a sierra; it is the chain of Belledonne. From the devastation of its summits and terraced slopes, one divines beneath its summer cloak of verdure concealing only its lower descent, the adamantine rock moulded for all time by the glaciers of the ice age. It is indeed the advance guard of those massive crystal formations, the veritable backbone of the Alps, which penetrate into France from Mont Blanc. On a morning like this, the Swiss peak itself can be seen, cleaving the far-away heavens which overhang Savoy.