Two years before this, the same piazza, the castle-yard at Turin, had witnessed a similar spectacle. Barthelemy Hector was a bookseller in Poictiers. A man of warm but well-tempered zeal, he travelled as far as the Valleys, diffusing that knowledge that maketh wise unto salvation. In the assemblage of white peaks that look down on the Pra del Tor is one named La Vêchera, so called because the cows love the rich grass that clothes its sides in summer-time. Barthelemy Hector would take his seat on the slopes of the mountain, and gathering the herdsmen and agriculturists of the Pra round him, would induce them to buy his books, by reading passages to them. Portions of the Scriptures also would he recite to the grandames and maidens as they watched their goats, or plied the distaff. His steps were tracked by the inquisitor, even amid these wild solitudes. He was dragged to Turin, to answer for the crime of selling Genevese books. His defence before his judges discovered an admirable courage and wisdom. “You have been caught in the act,” said his judge, “of selling books that contain heresy. What say you?” “If the Bible is heresy to you, it is truth to me,” replied the prisoner. “But you use the Bible to deter men from going to mass,” urged the judge. “If the Bible deters men from going to mass,” responded Barthelemy, “it is a proof that God disapproves of it, and that the mass is idolatry.” The judge, deeming it expedient to make short shrift with such a heretic, exclaimed, “Retract.” “I have spoken only truth,” said the bookseller, “can I change truth as I would a garment?” His judges kept him some months in prison, in the hope that his recantation would save them the necessity of burning him. This unwillingness to have resort to the last penalty was owing to no feeling of pity for the prisoner, but entirely to the conviction that these repeated executions were endangering the cause of their Church. “The smoke of these martyr-piles,” as was said with reference to the death of Patrick Hamilton, “was infecting those on whom it blew.” But the constancy of Barthelemy compelled his persecutors to disregard these prudential considerations. At last, despairing of his abjuration, they brought him forth and consigned him to the flames. His behaviour at the stake “drew rivers of tears,” says Leger, “from the eyes of many in the Popish crowd around his stake, while others vented reproaches and invectives against the cruelty of the monks and the inquisitors.”[46]