The affair of his rescue of Pecolat is another illustration of his character and of the strange, turbulent age in which he lived; and it went far to embitter the hatred of the duke and the bishop against him. This poor fellow was the jester, song-singer and epigrammatist of the madcap patriots who were associated under the title of "Sons of Geneva." Under a trumped-up charge of plotting the death of the bishop he was kidnapped and carried away to one of the castles in the neighborhood, and there tortured until a false confession was wrung from him implicating Berthelier and others. To secure his condemnation to death he was brought back into the city and presented before the court; but the sight of the poor cripple, racked and bruised with recent tortures, and his steadfastness in recanting his late confession, wrought more with the judges than the fear of the duke, and he was acquitted. But the feeble and ferocious bishop, moved partly by malignity and partly, no doubt, by sincere and cowardly terror, was resolved to kill him; and by some fiction declaring him to have been in the minor orders, he clapped him into the bishop's prison, claiming to try him by ecclesiastical law. The story of renewed tortures inflicted on their helpless comrade, and their knowledge of the certain death that awaited him, stirred the blood of the patriots of Geneva. It was just the moment for the prior of St. Victor to show that the studies at Freiburg and Turin that had made him _doctor utriusque juris_ had not been in vain. He would fight the bishop with his own weapon of Church law. He despatched Pecolat's own brother with letters to the archbishop of Vienne, metropolitan to the bishop of Geneva, and, using his family influence, which was not small, he secured a summons to the bishop and chapter of Geneva to appear before the archiepiscopal court and give account of the affair, and meanwhile to cease all proceedings against the prisoner. [Illustration: THE DUNGEON OF BONIVARD.]