The Parliament, with becoming judicial impartiality, would take no step in the matter until they had heard Villeneuve in his defence and had something tangible, such as the pamphlet which it was sought to suppress, before them. Nothing more was done, consequently, than the issuing of a summons to Villeneuve to appear at the bar of the house on a certain day and give an account of himself. This gave him all he required: time to have his pamphlet printed. Keeping the compositors at work, with a promise of higher pay if they used despatch, it was not only ready before the day of citation came round, but had been distributed gratis in numbers to the public as well as to the members of the medical profession. They reckoned without their host who thought that Michel Villeneuve was to be cowed by opposition, however imposingly headed. The doctors were naturally excessively wroth with this daring move on the part of the man they desired to crush. He had not awaited the decision of the Parliament; and neither now did they pause; for believing they had a hold upon him on the score of heresy, implied in the practice of judicial astrology or divination, they had him summoned before the Inquisitor of the king as an enemy to the Church, and contemner of its statutes. There was no regularly established Inquisition at this time in France; but papal inquisitors, often Italians by birth, were commonly enough found accredited by the Holy See, with the sanction of the Sovereign, to the large towns of the country. There they held courts before which cases of imputed heresy were tried and adjudged--the decisions come to, however, being always made subject to revision by the civil tribunals of the realm. Nay, there was a right of demurrage to the jurisdiction of the inquisitor, at the option of the party incriminated, were he minded to be tried by the ordinary civil, rather than the extraordinary ecclesiastical, court. We might have imagined that Michael Servetus, with the experience he had had of ecclesiastical incapacity to hear reason and ‘true judgment give,’ as he interpreted it, would have paused before venturing to appear before the inquisitor of the king; but so safe must Michel Villeneuve have felt against a charge of heresy at this time, and so secure in his new designation, that he did not hesitate to obey the summons; although we learn that had he been so minded, he might as a member of the Faculty of Physicians have even disregarded it entirely. He appeared accordingly at the proper moment; and so well did he play his part, so thoroughly did he satisfy the inquisitor of the king that he was a good Christian, that he left the court with flying colours, absolved of all suspicion of heresy, to the utter discomfiture of his accusers, who had now nothing for it but patiently to wait the award of the Parliament.