In the town of Vienne it was generally thought that the Vibailly De la Cour had been the active party in favouring the evasion of Villeneuve. He was known to be intimate with the doctor, who had lately carried his daughter successfully through a long and dangerous illness, and had been loud in praise of the skill and devotion that had been shown with so happy a result. Chorier,[66] the historian of Dauphiny, hints guardedly at something of the kind when he speaks of the imprisonment of M. Villeneuve on religious grounds. ‘It fell out,’ says Chorier, ‘that by his own ingenuity and the assistance of his friends, M. Villeneuve escaped from confinement.’ In the record of proceedings after the flight the only thing mentioned is the fact of the gaoler having given the prisoner the key of the garden; on all else there is absolute silence; whence, as D’Artigny says, we may infer that there is mystery of some sort connected with the escape. We, for our part, should have no difficulty in finding a key to the mystery, had there been fewer grounds for the presumption of friendly connivance than there undoubtedly were in the business. John Calvin, arch-heretic in the eyes of the Gallic Church and its heads, could not, we must presume, have been held in the highest possible esteem by the Cardinal Archbishop of Lyons, to say nothing of brother Mathias Ory, Inquisitor of the king of France and all the Gauls. But the arrest of Villeneuve and the proceedings against him thus far, had depended entirely on information supplied by the Reformer of Geneva. The managers of the process against Servetus were men much too astute, much too clear-sighted not to see that it was John Calvin who was writing under the mask of William Trie; and one among them at least may have known that the state of feeling between the Reformer of Geneva and the Physician of Vienne had long been such that he of Geneva might not be indisposed to make use of them to wreak his vengeance against a personal enemy under the guise of a common heretic. The Judges indeed must all have seen from the letters of Villeneuve to Calvin that the two men were at daggers-drawn, and that the provocation on either part was neither new nor slight, but of long standing, and, judging by his present attitude, on Calvin’s side deadly. We can fancy brother Mathias Ory chuckling over the sweet simplicity of the Viennese mediciner’s sorry subterfuge in pretending to enact the part of ‘Servetus the Spaniard, though he was no such personage, and knew nothing of the place in Spain where he was born!’