his mother, seizing him and dragging him to punishment; he screamed aloud, and was near dying of fright.[483] He interested every one who saw him; he was so mild; harmless as a new-born child, they said, so that the cruel abbot knew not how to justify his death. He thought that if he had Toussaint’s books and papers, he could find an excuse for burning him. One day the monks came to the wretched young man, took him out of the unwholesome pit, and led him into the abbot’s room. ‘Write to your host at Basle,’ said the latter; ‘tell him that you want your books to amuse your leisure, and beg him to send them to you.’ Toussaint, who understood the meaning of this order, hesitated. The abbot gave utterance to terrible threats. The affrighted Toussaint wrote the letter, and was sent back to his pestilential den. Thus the very moment when the evangelical christians were hoping to have some relief was marked by an increase of severity. The Reform--Margaret was its representative at that time in the eyes of many--the afflicted Reform saw her children around her, some put to death, others in chains, all threatened with the fatal blow. The sister of Francis I., heartbroken and despairing, would have shielded with her body those whom the sword appeared ready to strike; but her exertions seemed useless. Suddenly a cry of joy was heard, which, uttered in the Pyrenees, was reechoed even to Calais. The _Sun_ (for thus, it will be remembered, Margaret called her brother) appeared in the south to reanimate the kingdom of France. On the 21st of March Francis quitted Spain, crossed the Bidassoa, and once more set his foot on French ground. He had recovered his spirits; an overflowing current of life had returned to every part of his existence. It seemed that, delivered from a prison, he was the master of the world. He mounted an Arab horse, and, waving his cap and plume in the air, exclaimed as he galloped along the road to St. Jean de Luz: ‘Once more I am a king!’ Thence he proceeded to Bayonne, where his court awaited him, with a great number of his subjects who had not been permitted to approach nearer to the frontier. Nowhere was the joy so great as with Margaret and the friends of the Gospel. Some of them determined to go and meet the king and petition him on behalf of the exiles and the prisoners, feeling persuaded that he would put himself at the head of the party which the detested Charles V. was persecuting. These _most pious Gauls_, as Zwingle calls them,[484] petitioned the monarch; Margaret uttered a cry in favour of the miserable;[485] but Francis, though full of regard for his sister, could not hide a secret irritation against Luther and the Lutherans. His profane character, his sensual temperament, made him hate the evangelicals, and policy demanded great reserve.