Lambert had made full trial of the monastic life. He had even immured himself for some time in a Carthusian retreat, but found its inmates in no respect superior to the Franciscans. At last an opportunity for escape offered. In 1522, when a score of years had passed since he entered upon his novitiate, he was despatched with letters to the general of his order. Instead of fulfilling his commission, he traversed Switzerland, and made his way to Wittemberg, where he satisfied the desire he had long entertained, of meeting the great reformer to whose works he owed his own spiritual enlightenment. Full of zeal for the propagation of the doctrines he had embraced, Lambert, not long after (1524), established himself at Metz as a favorable point from which France might be influenced. But the commotion excited by his opponents--perhaps, also, his own lack of prudence--compelled him within a fortnight to flee to Strasbourg.[242] Here, more secure, but scarcely more judicious, he busied himself with sending over the French borders numbers of tracts composed or translated by himself, and addressing to Francis and the chief persons of his court appeals which, doubtless, rarely if ever reached their eyes.[243] In another field of labor, to which the Landgrave of Hesse called him, François Lambert performed services far more important than any he was permitted to render his native land. As the first French monk to throw aside his habit--above all, as the first to renounce celibacy and defend in a published treatise the step he had taken (1523), no French reformer, even among those of far greater abilities and wider influence, was regarded by the adherents of the Roman Catholic Church with so intense a dislike.[244] The firm hold which the Reformation was gaining on the population of several places of great importance, close upon the eastern frontiers of the kingdom, was a portent of evil in the eyes of the Sorbonne; for Metz, St. Hippolyte, and Montbéliard, all destined to be absorbed in the growing territories of France, were already bound to it by close ties of commercial intercourse. [Sidenote: Jean Châtellain, of Metz.]