CHAPTER II. POISONING OF THE REFORMERS—CONVERSION OF THE HEAD OF THE FRANCISCANS. (SPRING, 1535.) [Sidenote: ULTRAMONTANE PLOTS.] The ultramontanes were more zealous than ever. Many would only employ lawful arms; but there were some who were by no means scrupulous as to the means adopted to vanquish the enemies of Rome. Fanatics make a false conscience for themselves, and then look upon culpable actions as good ones. Empire was slipping from the hands of the Church; it must, at any cost, be restored to her, thought the extravagant Roman-catholics of Geneva. Canon Gruet, in particular—his _famulus_, Gardet the priest, and Barbier, in the service of the bishop of Maurienne, thought that, as neither duke, bishop, nor mameluke could do anything, other means must be devised to check that furious torrent which threatened to sweep away papacy, temples, priests, and images. Fanatics, whom the wise men of catholicism are unanimous in condemning, were plotting in the dark and muttering softly that as Farel, Viret, and Froment were all living in the same house, they could easily be got rid of at one blow. Some inkling of these guilty designs got abroad, and the Reformers were warned to be on their guard; but such plots did not trouble them. 'If we were all three dead,' said Froment, 'God would soon raise up others. Out of stones can He not raise up children unto Abraham?' The work of darkness began.[494] There lived in Geneva at that time a married woman and mother of a family, Antonia Vax by name; she was of quick perception, melancholy temperament, enthusiastic imagination, weak rather than depraved. In those days poison was much used; Bonivard had often related, 'how pope Alexander VI., wishing to have the money and benefices of two or three cardinals, had drunk in mistake from the flagon in which stood the poisoned wine, and had been caught in his own trap.' Antonia had seen poison employed. When in service at Lyons, nine years before, she had remarked that one of her companions always carried with him a little box piously covered with an _Agnus Dei_: 'It contains sublimate,' he had told her. More than once after this, when the unfortunate woman, of dark and dreamy temperament, felt the vapors rise to her brain, she had cried out: 'How wretched I am! how I should like to be out of this world! If I only had some sublimate!' At Bourg she had seen her mistress, in complicity with a Spanish doctor, give her husband poison; and entering afterwards the household of an illustrious family, the Seigneur de Challe, nephew to the bishop of Maurienne, she had seen her master poison his mother's husband. After this Antonia came to Geneva with her husband and children.[495] [Sidenote: ANTONIA AND THE PRIESTS.]