This enables us to understand why, in certain moments of his reign, although he was not naturally cruel, he showed such pitiless hostility against the Reformers. He was impressed with the notion that he was acting as a statesman, and he sought to smother in a sea of blood, the sinister phantoms with which the (Roman) Catholic clergy had peopled his imagination. Otherwise, it was a strange and interesting scene to witness the struggle between Marguérite de Valois and her brother, upon the conduct to be pursued towards the Reformers. At one time the Christian woman had the sway. Francis resisted the Sorbonne. He promised to take from the Lutherans all he could, and to the utmost. He would give them, what has been called, _the mass of seven points_, or the suppression of seven abuses in the worship of the Romish church. At another time it was the Catholic or politic prince, who seemed to triumph. Marguérite de Valois bent before the stormy temper of her brother, shrouded herself in docility and silence, resumed even certain practices of Catholicism, and finally veiled her faith in such a manner that it is still a matter of dispute whether she died in the old or the new communion. IV. It appeared, in 1533, as if better days were about to dawn upon the French Reformation. The queen-mother, Louise de Savoie, who hoped to redeem by fanatic bigotry the libertinism of her youth, had just died. Francis I. had made an alliance with the Protestants of the League of Smalcald, and the credit of Marguérite de Valois had thence increased. She took advantage of the occasion to open the pulpits of Paris to Gérard Roussel, Courault, and Bertault, who leaned towards the Reformed doctrines. The bishop, Jean du Bellay, offered no opposition. He was a man of great reading, and in his letters to Melancthon signed himself: _yours cordially_. The churches were crowded. Noël Beda, and other doctors of the Sorbonne, tried to raise the people; but they were banished by the Parliament. At this, the rage of the monks grew boundless. They performed, at their college of Navarre, a representation in which Marguérite de Valois, reading the Bible while spinning, was suddenly changed into an infernal fury. The Sorbonnists condemned at the same time one of her books, entitled _The Mirror of the Sinful Soul_, where no mention was made either of saints, or of purgatory, or of any other redemption than that of Jesus Christ. A Cordelier declared in a public sermon, that Marguérite deserved to be inclosed in a sack and thrown into the river. Such insolence was too great for the king’s endurance. He had the regents of the college of Navarre punished, and the censure of the Sorbonne disavowed by the university in a body. He even threatened to inflict upon the Cordelier the penalty with which the monk had menaced Marguérite de Valois; but she interceded for him, and the punishment was commuted.