Béda's next target was the Cercle de Meaux, the humanist reform group that had come under the protection of Marguerite of Navarre. In 1523, he condemned the sermons of two of its members and forced them to recant. He also had the Sorbonne pass a resolution condemning translations of the Scriptures into Greek, Hebrew, or French, a direct attack on Jacques Lefèvre, one of Marguerite's favorites, who had just published a French version of the New Testament. He went after others in Marguerite's set, including Louis de Berquin, a young nobleman who was responsible for translating Luther's books into French, and was about to have him tried for heresy when Marguerite intervened. Francis saved Berquin, but all of his books were confiscated from his library and burned just outside of Notre-Dame. Marguerite later saved him again, but Béda won out in the end. The Inquisition waited until Francis was out of Paris before hurriedly arresting Berquin, then even more hurriedly passing sentence and carrying it out. Berquin was burned at the stake in 1529.
Between 1529 and 1533, the forces of orthodoxy and the forces of humanist reform battled in France, with neither side able to establish a clear victory. Francis, ever the pragmatist, favored Béda and the Inquisition as a means of keeping order but was often swayed equally by the passion of his sister. No one knew which side would be in ascendancy from one day to the next.
It was into this incendiary environment that Michel de Villenueve came to begin his course of study at the University of Paris. Also at the university at this time was another student, two years older, a brilliant, ambitious, driven man whose life and work would haunt Michael Servetus's own like a deadly shadow.
That student, born Jean Chauvin, had Latinized his name in Paris to Johannus Calvinus, before later shortening it to John Calvin.
AMBITION BEGETS IDEOLOGY, not the other way around.
Jean Chauvin was born on July 10, 1509, in the cathedral town of Noyon, in Picardy, about fifty miles northeast of Paris. The fourth of five sons, Jean's mother died when he was three. His father, Gérard, was a notary in the service of Charles de Hangest, the bishop of Noyon.
The de Hangests belonged to the first order of French aristocracy.
Charles was one of the twelve peers of France, and the family had held the bishopric for as long as anyone could remember. All ecclesiastic and political affairs in Noyon revolved around them, and the economy of the town depended on them.
The Chauvin family, by contrast, was only one small step removed from the laboring class. Gérard was the first not to work with his hands. His position in the service of Bishop de Hangest represented a great leap forward in the family fortunes. It gave him access to the town's leading citizens and to favors from the Church. Most importantly, it allowed Jean, an obviously bright boy, to mingle socially with the three de Hangest sons.
And so Jean Chauvin grew up in the company of noblemen. He ran in and out of the de Hangest home like one of the family. He went to the local private school with them, played games with them, had meals with them. When the de Hangest boys got a special tutor, their friend Jean sat in with them and received the lessons as well. He was like the one scholarship student at an elite boarding school, better at his lessons by virtue of his sharp intelligence but always aware of the chasm between himself and these golden boys. In this chasm lay the seeds of John Calvin's burning ambition.
When it came time to go to college, the three de Hangest boys naturally chose the University of Paris. Jean wanted to go as well, but it was expensive to go to the University of Paris. The Chauvins didn't have that kind of money. So Gérard asked the de Hangest family to help his son. Through their influence, Jean was appointed a chaplain of the local church. The post came with a salary. The boy, only twelve and obviously in no position to fulfill the duties associated with the job, paid a small percentage of the money to someone else to be the real chaplain, then used the rest to meet his expenses. Although he would not return to Noyon again except for an occasional visit, and once to bury his father, Jean would nonetheless hold two more of these honorary positions over the course of the next ten years, thus subsidizing his entire schooling.
That taken care of, Jean Chauvin went off to the University of Paris with his aristocratic friends. He spent his first three months at the Collège de la Marche, where he Latinized his name and studied with an excellent teacher, Mathurin Cordier, a humane, civilized man who is credited with polishing Calvin's Latin and French. Soon, however, Calvin transferred to the infamous Collège de Montaigu, seat of orthodoxy, headed by Noël Béda.
It would be difficult to be farther removed from the modern vision of higher education—ivy-covered buildings, green commons, coed dormitories—than the Collège de Montaigu. Students at the University of Paris were boarded in slums, fed rotten food, beaten in class, and generally deprived of sleep and exercise. And of all the colleges at the University of Paris, Montaigu was the worst offender. Erasmus himself had attended Montaigu but left after a year. He couldn't stand it, and once again food played a part, as Francis Hackett noted in his biography of Francis I:
Erasmus so piteously described [Montaigu as] a barrack, filthy, bleak, inhospitable, reeking with the foullest smells, clotted with dirt, brayed with noises, where the dinner would be stale bread and half a herring. Here, at four in the morning, a small wretch of fourteen would begin his lessons. With short breaks they would go on to seven in the evening, larded with mass, with religious exercises and with floggings.
Some students turned to drink and others died. Rabelais called it “Collège de pouillerie [filth],” saying, “If I were king of Paris, the devil take me if I should not set fire to it, and burn the principal and regents who endure such inhumanity before their very eyes.” According to Erasmus biographer George Faludy, the Parisians themselves called it “the very cleft between the buttocks of Mother Theology.”
And people wonder where Calvin got his austerity.
Nothing affords a more precise picture of the conditions under which an enterprising young sixteenth-century scholar acquired an education than the dispute that was raging in 1523, when Calvin first arrived, between the Collège de Montaigu and the Collège de Sainte-Barbe, another elite part of the university, located directly across the street.
The street was the rue Saint-Symphorien, also known as the rue des Chiens, or the Street of Dogs. The rue des Chiens was more sewer than boulevard, owing to the fact that Montaigu drained its wastes into it. When Sainte-Barbe complained, the city council ordered the street paved, with both colleges bearing the cost. The result of the paving was that Montaigu's sewage no longer settled in the street but instead slid down the pavement, which sloped downhill and onto Sainte-Barbe's front doorstep. The college complained again, this time in vain. Sainte-Barbe tried to remedy the situation by covertly breaking up the pavement and reversing the slope of the street back toward Montaigu. It was conceived as a night operation, and the students were recruited for the work. But it was too big a job for a single evening, and Montaigu discovered the ruse in the morning. The next evening, when the Sainte-Barbe students took up their picks and shovels, they were pelted with stones from the upper-story windows of Montaigu. The Sainte-Barbe students returned fire, and everybody poured into the street; there were many casualties and much property damage, including broken windows and a damaged chapel crucifix. In the morning both colleges agreed to put in a drain.
AS A RESULT OF THE proceeds from his absentee chaplaincy, Calvin had enough money to live like one of the richer students and had things a little bit better. He boarded out, which gave him slightly more freedom (and fewer offensive sensory assaults), and, most im-portantly, his relative wealth enabled him to strike up a friendship with Nicholas Cop, son of Guillaume Cop, a professor of medicine at the university.
Guillaume Cop was a scholar, a man of letters, and Francis's chief physician, which gave him considerable clout and some celebrity. He was also a humanist, and Béda's leading opponent at the university. It was Cop who had circulated Melanchthon's work in direct violation of the S
orbonne's edicts. He was friends with Guillaume Budé, the preeminent French literary humanist, and he also corresponded with Erasmus. Although the Cops were certainly more educated and accomplished than the de Hangests, Calvin's relationship with this family became very similar to his relationship with his first benefactors. The Cops were upper class and genteel; they lived nicely. Because Calvin had the manners of an aristocrat he was often invited to their home. There he met the great Budé himself. Budé was a man who did not get his hands dirty, who moved back and forth between the court and the great minds of France, a gentleman scholar who nonetheless wielded influence—the French Erasmus.
Everything, in short, that Calvin had decided he wanted to be.
But before he could become Erasmus, Calvin had to contend with his father, Gérard. By 1528, when John Calvin completed that prerequisite five-year arts course, a rising star with every intention of staying on in Paris and fulfilling his dream, Gérard had run into some problems back in Noyon. It seems there had been some misunderstanding about the old bishop's accounts, and the bishop had wanted to see the books. Gérard took offense at this and refused. Perhaps he felt his honor was at stake. Then again, he kept refusing to show the books until the Noyon clergy felt the need to excommunicate him. Given the severity of the punishment, this would seem to be carrying honor a little too far. Perhaps there was something in the books that Gérard did not want the bishop to see after all.
Anyway, the entire experience rather soured Gérard on the Church. He decided to pull his son out of it and get the boy into something sensible, like law, which even back in the sixteenth century was an extremely lucrative profession and could be counted upon to provide the sort of living that would support not only a young man but his excommunicated father, and his father's second family as well. Therefore, as soon as Jean had taken his degree, Gérard instructed his son to leave Paris to go study law at Orléans. This Calvin, as a dutiful son, agreed to do, although he was not happy about it.
The University of Orléans offered a much more relaxed atmosphere. Students had more freedom and weren't beaten by their professors. Calvin studied law and made the acquaintance of a new circle of humanists and moderate reformers. Rabelais was around, and they might have been thrown together through friends. Once again, Calvin distinguished himself as a student, working long hours, mastering the finer points of his law studies. But still, he didn't have his heart in it. His passion was the classics.
Soon, he had an opportunity to exercise that passion. Marguerite had been given the Duchy of Berry by her brother in 1517. There was a school there, the University of Bourges, and Marguerite made it a pet project, inviting outstanding professors who could be expected to teach along the new reformed lines. In 1529, she secured a real plum, Andreas Alciati, an Italian legal scholar who had written his first book at fifteen and was the leading humanist lawyer in Italy. Calvin and some of his friends spent eighteen months in Bourges to attend Alciati's lectures.
Alciati, however, turned out to be a disappointment—as an Italian he was apparently too much of a hedonist for Calvin's taste. But at Bourges, Calvin did learn Greek from Melior Wolmar, another humanist Marguerite had lured to her school. Now he could read the classics and Erasmus's latest edition of the New Testament. He returned to Orléans and was licensed for his law degree. But instead of becoming a doctor of law and setting up a practice right away, he went to Paris. Francis, in one of his liberal moods, had been persuaded by Cop and Budé to establish a new school called the Lecteurs Royaux (Royal Readers), dedicated to teaching Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. The center of French humanist study immediately shifted there, and Calvin simply could not resist going too.
Then, in 1531, Gérard died, and Calvin was free to give up any pretense of establishing a law practice. He was twenty-two, learned, ambitious, and prepared. He had a large circle of influential, aristocratic friends in Paris, Orléans, and Bourges. He knew the Cops, he knew Budé, and it is possible that he had been introduced to Marguerite herself. The time had come for him to make a name for himself.
So he wrote a book.
The book was called Commentary on Lucius Anneas Seneca's Two Books on Clemency. Seneca, the Roman playwright who is best known for adaptations of Oedipus, The Trojan Women, and Medea, was also tutor and advisor to the emperor Nero. Such a man might seem at first blush an unlikely subject for a humanist treatise, but Seneca was a philosopher as well and known to have exerted a calming influence on his mentally unbalanced young charge.
Calvin intended the book as the kind of gentle call for reform and tolerance that had gained Erasmus his great reputation. (Erasmus had, in fact, already translated some of Seneca's works some years before.) It was written in polished Latin and used suggested parallels rather than outright argument to make its points. In his preface, Calvin adopted a tone of fawning modesty that belied the self-confidence of a man who had been assured by his influential friends of an interested and sizable audience:
Whoever in this day has been born with more than average ability… generally rushes out with it into the world, fired with the ambition of getting fame, so that posterity may venerate his memory with monuments to his genius… Hence the insane passion to write something… Publishing inchoate books the writers often plead the inexperience of youth, or the wanton entreaties of their friends, and chatter I know not what trifles to escape the imputation of having committed a mistake. As for me, I should want to bring forth no embryos at all if I could produce only premature ones; in fact, I should rather abandon them as abortions than bring them forth before their time. My purpose is not so much to commend myself to the benevolent reader as to the critical one, the more so since I come from the common class of people and even if I should be gifted in erudition to a moderate degree, I have nothing that could excite any hope of fame.
Calvin was extremely displeased when he was told that in order to get his book published, he was going to have to pay for it himself. But no matter—he dug into those Noyon benefices and forged ahead. He put out his book, held his breath, and waited to be discovered.
Soon after publication, Calvin decided to help discovery along a bit. In a letter dated April 22 1532, he wrote to his friend François Daniel:
The die is cast. My Commentaries on the books of Seneca De Clementia have been printed, but at my own expense, and have drawn from me more money than you can well suppose. At present I am using every endeavour to get some of it back. I have stirred up some of the professors in this city to make use of them in lecturing. In the University of Bourges I have induced a friend to do this from the pulpit in a public lecture. You also can help me, if you will not take it amiss. You will do so on the score of old friendship, especially as without doing any damage to your reputation you may do me this service, which will also tend perhaps to the public good. If you are willing to oblige me I will send you a hundred copies or as many as you please. Meanwhile accept this copy for yourself, and do not suppose by accepting it that I hold you bound to do what I ask.
But Calvin had miscalculated. He missed the market. By the time he published Commentaries, the public had tired of discreet gentlemen's analyses and moved on. In 1532, people wanted more exciting stuff, like that hot new down-with-the-pope, get-rid-of-the-Mass, let-priests-marry Protestant genre coming out of Germany. Many were reading that fiery attack on the Trinity that had been published in Haganau by a brilliant young Spanish heretic.
So John Calvin, in his first effort, experienced what many new authors with bad timing and equally bad luck experience: his book bombed. Nobody bought it. Nobody talked about it. Nobody clamored for a sequel. It was, for all intents and purposes, as if the book had never existed.
Later, Calvin scholars and even Calvin himself would pinpoint the time of his conversion to Protestantism as the period just before this book came out. In his Commentary on the Psalms, published much later, in 1557, he wrote:
Since I was more stubbornly addicted to the superstitions of the Papacy than to be easily drawn o
ut of that so deep mire, by a sudden conversion, He subdued my heart (too hardened for my age) to docility. Thus, having acquired some taste of true piety, I burned with such great zeal to go forward that although I did not desist from other studies I yet pursued them more indifferently, nor had a year gone by when all who were desirous of this purer doctrine thronged to me, novice and beginner that I was, in order to learn it.
The Seneca book, it is therefore argued, was an afterthought, a trifle of no real importance, particularly to Calvin. Still, it seems unlikely that a man who wrote a letter fervently pressing a hundred copies of his book on his friend was not passionate and desperate for that book to succeed.
Failure was something Calvin had not experienced before. He had not foreseen it. He was not prepared for it. And this failure was even more ignominious because he had paid for it. It was a good thing his father was dead. Gerard Chauvin would have had a few choice words to say about that.
John Calvin realized that he was not going to be the new Erasmus.
So he gritted his teeth and decided to be something else.
SOON AFTERWARD, IN 1533, Calvin returned to the University of Paris, where his friend Nicholas Cop had just been made the new rector.
In contrast to Calvin, Cop's star was definitely ascending. He was by this time a doctor of medicine like his prestigious father and, through his father, knew many influential people, including Marguerite herself. As rector, he was now a person of even greater standing at the university, and therefore within the reform movement as well. And in Paris in early 1533, it seemed, for the first time, that the reformers might have the upper hand.
Francis was gone, off on one of his big hunting expeditions, and he had left Marguerite and her husband, Henri of Navarre, in charge of the city of Paris. Marguerite had promptly taken advantage of this situation by inviting Gérard Roussel, a member of the Cercle de Meaux, to Paris under her protection. Roussel was a fiery speaker, and everywhere he went, controversy followed. Marguerite invited him to preach at the Louvre before an audience of some five thousand Parisians during Lent.
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