In October, 1638, Robert Boyle and his brother were sent into France. After a short stay at Lyons, they reached Geneva, where Robert remained with his tutor for about a year and three quarters. During his residence here an incident occurred which he regarded as the most important event of his life, and which we therefore give in his own words. "To frame a right apprehension of this, you must understand that, though his inclinations were ever virtuous, and his life free from scandal and inoffensive, yet had the piety he was master of already so diverted him from aspiring unto more, that Christ, who long had lain asleep in his conscience (as He once did in the ship), must now, as then, be waked by a storm. For at a time which (being the very heat of summer) promised nothing less, about the dead of night, that adds most terror to such accidents, [he] was suddenly waked in a fright with such loud claps of thunder (which are oftentimes very terrible in those hot climes and seasons), that he thought the earth would owe an ague to the air, and every clap was both preceded and attended with flashes of lightning, so frequent and so dazzling that [he] began to imagine them the sallies of that fire that must consume the world. The long continuance of that dismal tempest, where the winds were so loud as almost drowned the noise of the very thunder, and the showers so hideous as almost quenched the lightning ere it could reach his eyes, confirmed him in his apprehensions of the day of judgment's being at hand. Whereupon the consideration of his unpreparedness to welcome it, and the hideousness of being surprised by it in an unfit condition, made him resolve and vow that, if his fears were that night disappointed, all his further additions to his life should be more religiously and watchfully employed. The morning came, and a serene, cloudless sky returned, when he ratified his determinations so solemnly, that from that day he dated his conversion, renewing, now he was past danger, the vow he had made whilst he believed himself to be in it; and though his fear was (and he blushed it was so) the occasion of his resolution of amendment, yet at least he might not owe his more deliberate consecration of himself to piety to any less noble motive than that of its own excellence." After leaving Geneva, he crossed the Alps and travelled through Northern Italy. Here he spent much time in learning Italian; "the rest of his spare hours he spent in reading the modern history in Italian, and the new paradoxes of the great stargazer Galileo, whose ingenious books, perhaps because they could not be so otherwise, were confuted by a decree from Rome; his highness the Pope, it seems, presuming, and that justly, that the infallibility of his chair extended equally to determine points in philosophy as in religion, and loth to have the stability of that earth questioned in which he had established his kingdom."