This promised the idlers of Orleans a still more extraordinary spectacle than that given them when the friars got into their carts. Every day they expected to see the sentence carried out; but the government feared to appear too favourable to the Lutherans. The matter was protracted; some of the monks died in prison; the others were suffered to escape; and thus ended an affair which characterises the epoch, and shows the weapons that a good many priests used against the Reformation. If the sentence was never executed, the moral influence of the story was immense, and we shall presently see some of its effects. [Footnote 649: Calvin's manuscript narrative, recently discovered in the Geneva library by Dr. J. Bonnet, has been printed in the _Bulletin de l'Histoire du Protestantisme Français_, iii. p. 33.] [Footnote 650: This affair is mentioned by Sleidan and Theodore Beza, both of whom appear to have seen Calvin's narrative.] [Footnote 651: Calvin, _Hist. de l'Esprit des Cordeliers d'Orléans_. Geneva MS. (_Bulletin de l'Histoire du Protestantisme Français_, iii.) Beza, _Hist. Eccles._ p. 11. Sleidan, i. p. 361.] [Footnote 652: Calvin's MS. _Bulletin de l'Hist. du Prot. Fran._ iii. p. 36.] [Footnote 653: Lutheri _Opp._ xxii. p. 1463.] [Footnote 654: _History of the Reformation of the Sixteenth Century_, vol. ii. bk. viii. ch. ii.] CHAPTER XXXVI. FRANCIS PROPOSES A REFORMATION TO THE SORBONNE. (AUTUMN 1534.) [Sidenote: FRANCIS CONFESSES HIS ERRORS.] The disgust inspired by the imposture of the cordeliers of Orleans, and the jests lavished upon the monks in the Louvre and throughout Paris, were further encouragements to the king to prosecute his alliances with protestantism. He had, however, little need of a fresh incentive; the reform proposed by Melanchthon was in his view acceptable and advantageous, because it diminished the power of the pope, and corrected abuses incompatible with the new light, at the same time that it left untouched that catholicism from which the king had no desire to secede. In his private conversations with Du Bellay, Francis, laying aside all reserve, acknowledged frankly that the Romish Church was upon the wrong track, and said in a confidential tone, that 'Luther was not so far wrong as people said.' He did not fear to add that it was himself rather who had been mistaken. The King of France, and the country along with him, thus appeared to be in a good way for reform.