The development of the French Bible is still more slow and varied. There was a pre-Reformation translation, printed several times, at Lyons and at Paris; but it was of a purely mediæval character. Then a humanist, Jacques Lefèvres d'Étaples (Faber Stapulensis, d. 1536), undertook a new French translation from the Vulgate. The first French Bible translated from the original Hebrew and Greek was published in 1535 by Peter Robert Olivetan, a cousin of Calvin. The author himself, and Calvin, and others corrected and improved it from time to time, and nearly every twenty or thirty years a new editor would try to revise it. In this series of revisions one of the most successful was that of Frédéric Ostervald of Neuchâtel, in 1744. But the process is still going on, French and Swiss theologians vying one with another in fair competition. Moreover, the Protestant translation found many rivals in the work of Roman Catholics, especially in the great period of French literature in the reign of Louis XIV. Some of these translators, for example Bossuet, aimed at making the style of their translation as elegant as possible, while others, under the influence of Port Royal, paraphrased the text with a view rather to clearness. None of these versions had real success; none has become final. France still suffers from the lack of a classic form for its Bible. The attitude of a nation toward its Bible is largely determined by the development of the translation. It is obvious that the Germans hold to Luther's Bible even more insistently than the English do to their Authorised Version, and that in France there is an open field for every fresh attempt at revising and translating. The nation has not become united with its Bible, and, as regards language, the famous "Dictionnaire de l'Académie," aiming at a standard of literary uniformity, is but a poor and artificial substitute for the influence exercised in a living and natural way by the Bible. It is not our task here to trace the history of translations in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Hungary, and elsewhere. It is to a large extent a history of enthusiasm, devotion, and martyrdom, and at the same time of failure and oppression. Wherever the so-called Counter-Reformation, started by the Jesuits, gained hold of the people, the vernacular was suppressed and the Bible kept from the laity. So eager were the Jesuits to destroy the authority of the Bible--the paper pope of the Protestants, as they contemptuously called it--that they even did not refrain from criticising its genuineness and historical value. To sum up: it was the Bible which trained printers and translators and thereby made a noble contribution to modern civilisation and literature; on the other hand, it was printing and translating which made it possible for the Bible to become the popular book that ruled daily life. VII THE BIBLE RULES DAILY LIFE (1550-1850)