Rome, meanwhile, was not indifferent to what was taking place at Geneva. Between the papacy and the Reformation there were action and reaction, which kept both in constant agitation. When once the Catholic reaction began, not content with mere resistance, it assumed the offensive. The partisans of the pope, still pretty numerous in Geneva, informed the Bishop de la Baume of what occurred in the town; and he, who like all dispossessed princes was always expecting to be restored to his episcopal see, the sweets of which he remembered better than the bitterness, communicated with the pope. The latter gave to La Baume the cardinal’s hat, in the hope that this dignity might be a bait to draw the Genevese to place themselves once more under the crook of their bishop. Then he invited the prelates who were nearest neighbors to Geneva to take in hand the cause of their colleague. The Bishops of Lyons, Besançon, Lausanne, Vienne, Turin, Langres and Carpentras, met the Bishop of Geneva in the first of these towns. ‘The flock,’ they said, ‘being now deprived of its pastors, men so eminent, we must seize the opportunity to rescue it from the Reformation.’[787] Many Genevese Catholics had emigrated to Lyons, and they spared no pains to bring about the restoration of the prelate. Pierre de la Baume asked of his colleagues ‘the recovery of his diocese.’ The Cardinal of Tournon, the notorious persecutor of the Vaudois, and the introducer of the Jesuits into France, who was at this time archbishop of Lyons, was president of the meeting. He had thus an opportunity of satisfying his inextinguishable passion against the _Calvinists_. Jean Philippe, chief author of the banishment of Calvin, met with Tournon in the church at Lyons, and carried on intrigues with him.[788] The affair might perhaps have had a violent ending, but that a man was there present of a different stamp from the archbishop. This was Cardinal Sadoleto, who, as bishop Carpentras, a town in Dauphiné bordering on Savoy, seemed by his neighboring position bound to concern himself more particularly with Geneva. He was connected with Bembo, secretary to Leo X., was a great lover of the classics, of philosophy and the arts, and was a man of great eloquence, says Beza, but used it for extinguishing the true light.[789] He very much regretted that the Reformation appeared to be taking precedence of the Renaissance. He was, however, of more liberal mind than adherents of the pope usually were. He loved Melanchthon. He thought that it was not right to address the Genevese in the imperious tone of a master, with dogmatic arguments of the school, or with the intolerance of inquisitors, but rather in a polite style. Sadoleto was therefore instructed to write a letter to the Genevese in which he was to invite them mildly to return to the bosom of the Church. That the contrivances and efforts of the pope, of the Bishop de la Baume, of the Cardinal of Tournon and his colleagues, should issue only in a letter,