This piece is only cited to show to what lengths matters had gone, thanks to printing. It is very certain that all the pamphlets, placards, and other horrors published to raise religious warfare, did not aid in the progress of the Book. The King was not always disinterested on the technical question; books merited encouragement, at least as much as castigation, and besides, as time passed, they gradually transformed men and ideas. In spite of apparent severities, was not the King himself a little touched by contact with the new religion, like his sister Marguerite, or his sister-in-law, Renée of Ferrara? However that may be, he twice showed himself a resolute partisan of the celebrated Robert Estienne, son-in-law and associate of Simon de Colines, whose works in point of erudition and typography assumed day by day more importance. Robert Estienne had the great honour of being chosen from all his contemporaries by King Francis as the royal printer. This prince had ordered to be engraved for him by Claude Garamond, after the design of Ange Vergèce, the first cutter of matrices of his time, a special Greek character in three sizes, which was used in 1544 to compose the "Ecclesiastical History" of Eusebius. These are the famous royal types--_typi regii_--as Estienne did not fail to indicate on the title-pages of his works. It has been said since that Francis I. founded the Royal Printing House, but the truth is that Estienne kept these characters in his own office for use in the royal editions; they may now be seen in the Imprimerie Nationale at Paris. Robert Estienne married the daughter of Josse Badius, of Asch--Badius Ascencianus, one of the first Parisian typographers of the time. We reproduce the mark of Badius, representing the interior of a printing house, and shall return in a special chapter to the functions of these workshops. Meantime it appears proper to present to the reader a printing office of the time of Robert Estienne and Geoffroy Tory. [Illustration: Fig. 54.--Printing office of Josse Badius at the commencement of the sixteenth century.] Robert Estienne does not appear to have concerned himself much about the decoration of the Book. The purity of the text and the characters were essentials with him, erudition, and not art. He published many works in Latin and Greek, among them the _Thesaurus_, a great Latin dictionary published in 1532, also a Bible, with notes by Vatable, revised by Leon de Juda. From that came trouble. Leon de Juda was a partisan of Zwingli; the Sorbonne accused the Bible of leaning towards the Huguenots; Francis I. took the part of Estienne, but when that prince died Estienne fled to Geneva, where he was accused of having imported the royal types. The truth was that he simply imported the matrices. [Illustration: Fig. 55.--Portrait of Nicholas Bourbon. Wood engraving of the commencement of the sixteenth century.]