All these efforts were to prove useless. Liberty was beginning to raise her head in one of the smallest but most ancient cities of the Empire and the Church. It is a strange thing that the city bearing on its flag the symbols of these two absolute powers--the key of the popes and the eagle of the emperors--raised this very significant banner, and thus proclaimed, as if in a spirit of contradiction, liberty in Church and State. While other nations (if we except the Swiss League) were sleeping under the feudal sceptre of their masters, this little republic in the centre of Europe was awaking. Like a dead man lying in a vast cemetery, it began to stir and alone came forth triumphant from its tomb. In all the neighbouring countries, in Switzerland, Savoy, France, and places more remote, people talked of the strange movements taking place at Geneva, and of the daring resistance opposed by a few energetic citizens to a prince who was brother-in-law to Charles V. and uncle to Francis I. Men of the old times grew alarmed. True, it was but a cloud, small as a man’s hand, but it might grow into a fierce tempest in which the two ancient buttresses of feudal and Roman society--absolute power in spiritual and in temporal matters--might be shattered. What would happen then? Might not this emancipatory movement extend through Europe? At Geneva men talked of political liberty; at Wittemberg of religious reform: if these two streams should chance to unite, they would make a formidable torrent which would throw down the edifice of the dark ages and sweep away its ruins into the great abyss. ‘People spoke everywhere,’ Bonivard tells us, ‘of huguenots and mamelukes, as they once did of Guelfs and Ghibelines.’ The prior of St. Victor, to whom these things were reported, reflected on them and said in his musings: ‘Geneva is beginning to be a member in the body of christendom of which strange things are said.’ In examining them, however, he thought there was room for abatement both of hopes and fears:--‘Fame, as Virgil sings, is a goddess who makes things greater than they are.’[199] These things were greater than Bonivard thought. Geneva, by setting out in search of liberty, was to find the Gospel. The duke, the count, and the bishop, informed successively by their ambassadors, the vidame, and lastly by the mamelukes of ‘the little stove,’ ‘drank of these bitter waters’ and asked themselves if they were going to lose that city from which the house of Savoy had derived such great profit for centuries. They began to understand the imprudence of their rough policy; they began to regret the arrests and the murders; they would have liked that ‘the work was to be done over again.’ That seemed difficult; yet after many conferences, the three princes agreed upon certain plans, one or other of which they thought must succeed.