All this was done by the Sorbonne and parliament, as the king had not yet spoken out. At last he returned to the capital, and everybody thought he would be eager to fulfil the promises he had made the pope; but, on the contrary, he hesitated and affected to be scrupulous. The evil spirit that he had received from Clement VII. under the form of a Medici, was too young to have any influence over him. Besides, he was thinking much more just then of his alliance with the protestants of Germany than of his union with the pope, and the attacks made against his professors in the university annoyed him. Beda was not discouraged: he got some persons, who had access to the king, to beg that Roussel and his friends might be burnt. But how could that prince send the Lutherans of France to the stake at the very time he was seeking an alliance with the Lutherans of Germany? 'Nobody is condemned in France,' he said, 'without being tried. Beda wishes to have Roussel and his friends burnt; very well! let him first go to the Conciergerie and reduce them to silence.'[561] This was not what Beda wanted: he knew that it was easier to burn the chaplain than to refute him. But the king compelled him to go to the prison; and there the impetuous Beda and the meek Roussel stood face to face. The disputation began in the presence of witnesses. The prisoner brought forward, with much simplicity, the Scriptures of God; the syndic of the Sorbonne replied with scholastic quibbles and ridiculous trifling.[562] His own friends were embarrassed; everybody saw his ignorance; Beda left the prison overwhelmed with shame, and Roussel was not burnt.[563] [Sidenote: THE KING'S IRRITATION.] While Beda and Roussel were disputing in the Conciergerie, a different scene was passing at the Louvre. A friend of letters, belonging to the royal household, knowing the king's susceptibility, placed a little book elegantly bound on a table near which the king was accustomed to sit. Francis approached, took up the book heedlessly, and looked at it. He was greatly surprised on reading the title: _Remonstrance addressed to the King of France by the three doctors of Paris, banished and relegated, praying to be recalled from their exile_. It was a work published by Beda before his return to Paris, and had been carefully concealed from the monarch. 'Ho! ho!' said he, 'this book is addressed to me!' He opened and read, and great was his anger on seeing how he was insulted and slandered.... 'Francis I. regards neither pope nor Medici: in his eyes, the chief infallibility is always his own.' 'Send those wretches to prison,' he exclaimed; and immediately Beda, Le Picard, and Le Clerq were shut up in the bishop's prison on a charge of high treason.[564]