The Protestant poet, Clement Marot, to whom Francis I. had given a house, called the “House of the Bronze Horse,” translated at this epoch some of the Psalms into French verse, and his work obtained extraordinary vogue even at the court. The students, who used to amuse themselves in the evening in the Pré aux Clercs, opposite the Louvre, replaced their customary songs by the Psalms of Marot; and it became the fashion for a time among the lords and ladies of the court to cross the Seine in order to hear the chants of the students. Often they joined in; and the Huguenot king of Navarre, Antoine de Bourbon, was seen walking round the Louvre and singing a psalm at the head of a long procession of courtiers and scholars. The persecution, which for a time had slackened, was soon revived in all its fury. Marot took flight. Paris had grown too hot for him; “Paris,” he says, in an epigram dated 1537, “Paris, thou hast given me many a fright, even to the point of chasing me to death”:-- “Paris, tu m’as fait maints d’allarmes Jusqu’à me poursuyvre à la mort.” In spite of everything the deputies of the reformed church continued to meet at Paris in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, where they held secretly their first national synod in 1559. This assembly, of which not one member would have escaped the block had they been discovered, bound into one corporation the reformed churches of France, until then without cohesion. Francis II., husband of Mary Queen of Scots, and through her nephew of the Guises, allowed this persecuting family to carry on the cruel work of his father. The illustrious chancellor, Du Bourg, was hanged and burned in the Place de Grève, as to which Voltaire wrote: “This murder was of more service to Protestantism than all the most eloquent works written by its defenders.” Cardinal de Lorraine captured many other victims by surrounding a Protestant hotel in the Rue des Marais Saint-Germain. This street was the head-quarters of the reformed church, and many of its houses communicated with one another by means of mysterious apertures through which the inhabitants passed when threatened with arrest. The street in question, one of the most historic in all Paris, was lately rechristened by the name of Visconti in place of the one which it had borne for more than three centuries, and by which it was known, not only to the first Protestants of Paris, the d’Aubignés and the Du Moulins, but later on to the Duke de la Rochefoucauld and Mme. de Sévigné, to Racine and Voltaire, to Mlle. Clairon and Adrienne Lecouvreur, who all for a considerable time inhabited it, or were accustomed to visit its inhabitants. Meanwhile the reform continued to spread. Coligny and his two brothers, one of whom was a cardinal, joined it openly. These three Châtillons were now violently attacked in the Paris churches, and Jean de Han, a monk, took one day for his text, “Ite in Castellum quod contrà vos est,” which he