The first of those who were burned for heresy within the old limits of the kingdom, was a native of Boulogne, Jacques Pauvent, or Pavannes. A disciple of Lefevre, whom he had accompanied to Meaux, he was accused of having written theses against purgatory, the invocation of the Virgin and of the saints, and holy water. Crespin says: “He was a man of great earnestness and integrity.”[8] He was condemned, in 1524, to be burned alive in the Place de Grève. Pavannes, yet a young man, had, in a moment of weakness, uttered a kind of recantation. But he soon regained his courage, and walked to execution with a calm front, happier to die confessing his faith, than to live by denying it. At the stake, he discoursed on the sacrament of the supper with so much power, that a doctor said: “I would that Pavannes had not spoken, even had it cost the Church a million of gold.” The executions multiplied. One of the most illustrious victims of those times was Louis de Berquin, of whom Theodore de Bèze has said, doubtless with some exaggeration, that he would have been another Luther for France, if he had found in Francis I. another Elector of Saxony. The history of his life and death throws a great light upon the early days of the Reformation in France. Louis de Berquin came of a noble family of Artois. Unlike the knights of old, acquainted only with the helm and the sword, he applied himself without intermission to exercises of the mind: frank, loyal, openhearted, generous to the poor, he arrived at the age of forty, without having been married, or incurred the slightest suspicion of incontinence: _a wonderfully rare thing among courtiers_, says an old chronicle. Like Lefevre and Farel, he was very devout. “Before the Lord had given him to know His Gospel, he was,” according to Crespin’s recital, “a great partisan of the papistical constitutions, a constant auditor of masses and sermons, and an observer of fasts and feast-days.... The doctrine of Luther, then quite new in France, he held in utter abomination.” (p. 96.) But two things detached him from (Roman) Catholicism. His enlightened mind despised the gross ignorance of the doctors of the Sorbonne; his guileless heart revolted against their dark manœuvres; and as he had free speech at the court, he descanted unconstrainedly before Francis I., who entertained a great affection for him and for his character, and also on account of his contempt for the monks.