The news of the imprisonment of Courault rapidly spread through Geneva, and deeply affected the friends of the Reformation. A pastor in prison! Yes, and justly, if he were guilty of any common offence. But he had done what he believed to be his duty. From the Christian pulpit he had rebuked scandalous excesses, and on that account he was committed to prison, while those who were really guilty of them were let alone and went unpunished.[606] It appears from the protocol of the 19th, that two men, forming part of the band which had gone about singing by night and had made disturbances at Rive, had been themselves placed in confinement. But the place and the date of that affair prove that it was on a quite different charge. The incarceration of Courault filled Calvin and Farel with sorrow, for they esteemed their old and venerable colleague, and they knew how much he had already suffered for the truth’s sake. Some of the councillors and citizens friendly to the Reformation resolved to protest against the imprisonment of their pastor. Claude Savoye, Michel Sept, Lambert, Chautemps, Domaine d’Arlod, Claude and Louis Bernard, Deserts, Claude Pertemps, and many others joined Calvin and Farel, and they all went together in a long procession to the Hôtel de Ville. They entered the hall of the council, and found there two out of the four syndics, and these the men who were most against them, Richardet and de Chapeaurouge. Farel spoke first. He complained that they had acted ‘ill, wickedly, and unjustly in putting Courault in prison,’ and demanded that the Council of the Two Hundred should be assembled. The laymen thought it strange that their adversaries should not be satisfied with announcing, like Richardet, that they would not go to the preaching, but should seem to intend also to deprive their fellow-citizens of it by committing the preachers to prison. The notion that a syndic should presume to hinder him from hearing the Word of God especially irritated Michel Sept. ‘They shall preach!’ he said, vehemently. Farel, remembering all that he had done and borne through long years for this city of Geneva, to the emancipation of which he had probably contributed more than any other man by his teaching, his courage, his prayers, and his deeds, said to the magistrates, ‘Without me you would not be what you are.’