This proclamation afflicted Margaret very seriously. Will her brother ratify these fierce monastic prohibitions, or will he cooperate in the victory of truth? Will he permit the Reformation to pass from Germany into France? One circumstance filled the Duchess of Alençon with hope: the king declared in favour of Berquin. It will be recollected that this gentleman had been imprisoned in the Conciergerie. Three monks, his judges, entered his prison, and reproached him with having said that ‘the gates of hell can do nothing against him who has faith.’ This notion of a salvation entirely independent of priests exasperated the clergy.--‘Yes,’ answered Berquin, ‘when the eternal Son of God receives the sinner who believes in his death and makes him a child of God, this divine adoption cannot be forfeited.’ The monks, however, could see nothing but a culpable enthusiasm in this joyful confidence. Berquin sent Erasmus the propositions censured by his judges. ‘I find nothing impious in them,’ replied the prince of the schools. The Sorbonne did not think the same. The prior of the Carthusians, the prior of the Celestines, monks of all colours, ‘imps of antichrist,’ says the chronicler, ‘gave help to the band of the Sorbonne in order to destroy by numbers the firmness of Berquin.’--‘Your books will be burnt,’ said the pope’s delegates to the accused, ‘you will make an apology, and then only will you escape. But if you refuse what is demanded of you, you will be led to the stake.’--‘I will not yield a single point,’ he answered. Whereupon the Sorbonnists, the Carthusians, and the Celestines exclaimed: ‘Then it is all over with you!’ Berquin waited calmly for the fulfilment of these threats. When the Duchess of Alençon heard of all this, she immediately wrote to her brother, and fell at her mother’s knees. Louisa of Savoy was not inaccessible to compassion, in the solemn hour that was to decide her son’s liberty. That princess was one of those profane characters who think little of God in ordinary times, but cry to him when the sea in its rage is about to swallow them up. Shut in her closet with Margaret, she prayed with her that God would restore the king to France. The duchess, full of charity and a woman of great tact, took advantage of one of these moments to attempt to soften her mother in favour of Berquin. She succeeded: the regent was seized with a sudden zeal, and ordered the pope’s delegates to suspend matters until after the king’s return.[466]