The energy displayed by the citizens showed the bastard what he would have to expect if he laid hands on their independence. His creatures resolved therefore to set to work in another way: to enervate this proud and resolute people, and with that view to encourage superstition and profligacy in Geneva. Superstition would prevent the citizens from thinking about truth and reform, while profligacy would make them forget their dignity, their rights, and their dearest liberties. At the commencement of 1517--the year when the Reformation began in Germany--a bare-footed friar, named Thomas, came and preached at Geneva in _Italian_, and the people who did not understand a word listened to him with admiration. The Virgin Mary, the saints, and the departed were his ordinary theme. Bonivard shrugged his shoulders, saying: ‘He is a mere idiot with his cock-and-bull stories!’ The friar proceeded next to work miracles; sick persons were brought to him after service; he blessed them right and left, and many returned home cured. ‘What do you say to that?’ triumphantly asked some bigots of the sceptical prior. ‘Why, _imaginatio facit casum_, it is the effect of imagination,’ he replied. ‘The fools believe so firmly that he will heal them, that the cure follows; but it does not last long, and many return worse than they came.’ The honourable councillors, befooled like the rest, sent the friar ‘princely presents.’ As superstition did not suffice, entertainments and debauchery were added. Duke Philibert the Fair, who visited Geneva in 1498 with his bastard brother René, had already employed this means of subduing the Genevans. ‘Go,’ said he to his noblest lords, ‘and win over all these shopkeepers and mechanics by being on the most familiar footing with them.’ The Savoyard nobles, affably accosting the Genevans, used to sit down with them in the taverns, drink, laugh, and sing with them, bewildering the simple by their high-flown language and ‘grand airs.’ They concealed their subtle treachery under fine phrases; and throwing off all shame, they even permitted looks and gestures of abominable lewdness, infecting the hearts with impurity, and corrupting the young. The priests, far from opposing this depravity, were the first to give way to it. A shameful wantonness engendered criminal excesses which would have brought ruin on those who indulged in them and on the city itself. Effrontery stalked in the streets. The strangers who stopped in Geneva exclaimed:--‘It is indeed a city sunk to the eyes in pleasure. Church, nobles, and people are devoted to every kind of excess. You see nothing but sports, dances, masquerades, feasts, lewdness, and consequently, strife and contention. Abundance has generated insolence, and assuredly Geneva deserves to be visited with the scourge of God.’[89]