The friendship which the du Bellays afterwards bestowed upon Rabelais shows that he must have been something more than an amusing table companion. During the many ups and downs of his life he could always count upon the assistance and the support of his former classmates. Whenever he was in trouble with his clerical superiors he found the door of their castle wide open and if perchance the soil of France became a little too hot for this blunt young moralist, there was always a du Bellay, conveniently going upon a foreign mission and greatly in need of a secretary who should be somewhat of a physician besides being a polished Latin scholar. This was no small detail. More than once when it seemed that the career of our learned doctor was about to come to an abrupt and painful end, the influence of his old friends saved him from the fury of the Sorbonne or from the anger of those much disappointed Calvinists who had counted upon him as one of their own and who were greatly incensed when he pilloried the jaundiced zeal of their Genevan master as mercilessly as he had derided the three-bottled sanctity of his erstwhile colleagues in Fontenay and Maillezais. Of these two enemies, the former was of course by far the more dangerous. Calvin could fulminate to his heart’s content, but outside of the narrow boundaries of a small Swiss canton, his lightning was as harmless as a fire-cracker. The Sorbonne, on the other hand, which together with the University of Oxford stood firmly for orthodoxy and the Old Learning, knew of no mercy when her authority was questioned and could always count upon the hearty coöperation of the king of France and his hangman. And alas! Rabelais, as soon as he left school, was a marked man. Not because he liked to drink good wine and told funny stories about his fellow-monks. He had done much worse, he had succumbed to the lure of the wicked Greek tongue. When rumor thereof had first reached the abbot of his cloister, it was decided to search his cell. It was found to be full of literary contraband, a copy of Homer, one of the New Testament, one of Herodotus. This was a terrible discovery and it had taken a great deal of wire-pulling on the part of his influential friends to get him out of this scrape. It was a curious period in the development of the Church. Originally, as I told you before, the monasteries had been advance posts of civilization and both friars and nuns had rendered inestimable service in promoting the interest of the Church. More than one Pope, however, had foreseen the danger that might come from a too powerful development of the monastic institutions. But as so often happens, just because every one knew that something ought to be done about these cloisters, nothing was ever done.