A point so close to the centre of the Roman Catholic world as Ferrara could scarcely afford safety to an ardent reformer, even if the fame of his "Institutes" had not yet reached Rome; and Ercole the Second was too dependent upon the Holy See to shrink from sacrificing the guest his wife had invited to the palace. Returning, therefore, from Ferrara, without apparently pursuing his journey to Rome or even to Florence, Calvin retraced his steps and took refuge beyond the Alps. Possibly he may have stopped on the way in the valley of Aosta, and displayed a missionary activity, which has been denied by several modern critics, but is attested by local monuments and tradition, and has some support in contemporary documents.[406] [Sidenote: Revisits France.] [Sidenote: Is recognized while passing through Geneva.] [Sidenote: Farel compels him to remain.] Once more in Basle, Calvin resolved, after a final visit to the home of his childhood, to seek out some quiet spot in Germany, there to give himself up to those scholarly labors which he fancied would be more profitable to France than the most active enterprises he might engage in as a preacher of the Gospel. He had accomplished the first part of his design, had disposed of his property in Noyon, and was returning with his brother and sister, when the prevalence of war in the Duchy of Lorraine led him to diverge from his most direct route, so as to traverse the dominions of the Duke of Savoy and the territories of the confederate cantons of Switzerland. Under these circumstances, for the first time, he entered the city of Geneva, then but recently delivered from the yoke of its bishop and of the Roman Church. He had intended to spend there only a single night.[407] He was accidentally recognized by an old friend, a Frenchman, who at the time professed the reformed faith, but subsequently returned to the communion of the Church of Rome.[408] Du Tillet was the only person in Geneva that detected in the traveller, Charles d'Espeville, the John Calvin who had written the "Institutes." He confided the secret to Farel, and the intrepid reformer whose office it had hitherto been to demolish, by unsparing and persistent blows, the popular structure of superstition, at once concluded that, in answer to his prayers, a man had been sent him by God capable of laying, amid the ruins, the foundations of a new and more perfect fabric. Farel sought Calvin out, and laid before him the urgent necessities of a church founded in a city where, under priestly rule, disorder and corruption had long been rampant. At first his words made no impression. Calvin had traced out for himself a very different course, and was little inclined to exchange a life of study for the perpetual struggles to which he was so unexpectedly summoned. But when he met Farel's request with a positive refusal, pleading inexperience, fondness for literary pursuits, and aversion to scenes of tumult and